Sometimes people tell me that I should forget it and move on with life. Well, I don't want to forget it.

I have pictures of the World Trade Center's Memorial up on my desk at work. It's two bright shining lights stand tall among the Heavens, like two majestic sentinels watching over the countless brave heroes that lost their lives there.

I have family and friends who were directly affected by this tragic incident. Some were caught in the ashes of the first building's fall, others watched from their office windows desperate lives jump from the towers.

To this day, these images are still burned in my mind as harshly as they are in the minds of my family and friends'.

Some of the pictures at my desk are of people holding daffodils at the World Trade Center's Sphere, now in Battery City Park. A part of me feels incomplete because I can't be standing there, paying my respects as well.

It's different out here in California. Understandably enough, people don't talk about 9/11 as much here as they do in New York. When I talk to my friends in NYC, they tell me how the companies near Ground Zero are opening up for business again, how uneasy they feel going back to work down there, how they still lie awake and cry at night.

The distance makes it difficult to feel the same impact. The impact of Hurricane Andrew or the Oklahoma City bombing incidents didn't impact New Yorkers the same way they impacted Floridians and Oklahomans.

So it's not surprising that my friends here tell me to stop thinking about 9/11 and move on with life. No one of us should let such a senseless act paralyze us.

But to me, remembering it doesn't mean paralysis. To me, the remembrance of this incident is akin to the remembrance of a death in the family, because to many of my friends, that's exactly what it is.

The part of me that feels incomplete yearns to see the WTC Memorial for my own eyes. Maybe it's the distance that's the real issue. Maybe it's partly homesickness. I don't know.

All I know for sure is that this is something that I don't want to, nor can, forget. Ever.

. . .

Do you remember?