I was twenty-three and living three blocks from the dome of the U.S. Capitol—or, as my dad soon took to calling it, “the Bull’s Eye of the Western world” —on September 11, 2001. When the plane hit the second tower, I watched the impact on a scratchy analog TV from my desk at my first job, a glorified internship at a documentary production company in the Bethesda suburb.

My boss was a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist—a kind, if somewhat paternalistic older man who, as I discovered in those first years out of college, just rode the generational divide that separated the chauvinists from supporters of the Equal Rights Amendment. He had assembled in that white-washed office a crew of female producers and underlings: among them, a bona fide Jewish American Princess (who personally explained the term to me); a feisty Blackside alumna; and my first supervisor, a young woman just a couple of years older than me whom I worshipped like an elder sister.

I worshipped all of them, to be honest; they were the first career women I had ever known and they took great pride in directing the comedy of my acclimation to the Big City and the work world. I remember their silence that day, and I remember watching them as closely as I watched the gray fog and fire on the screen, wondering how they would shepherd me through this calamity.

Work was a bust, of course, and our boss insisted that we all take the day off. The Jewish American Princess tried to drive me home to Capitol Hill, but we could barely get through the crush of cars at DuPont Circle, and I can’t remember whether I walked or rode with her from that point on.

When I finally arrived at my shared apartment, the second-floor of a grand old slate-blue row house at 3rd and East Capitol, it was filled with weeping friends who worked on the Hill. The TV was still on, and it would remain on for days.

My husband Ben and I broke up four days before September 11—at my insistence, over his lunch hour, in the garden of the Hart Senate Building. He will never let me live that down. But Ben, also a Hill staffer, was at our apartment that afternoon, a friend I could not lose despite romantic quarrels. I have seen him cry more times than I can count, always for tender, good reasons, and that afternoon, his eyes were red and his cheeks were ruddy. When I came into the kitchen, he saw me and we shared an awkward greeting, then a brief embrace. It was this kindness, clean and willing, never presuming, that drew me back to him years later.

Even as the cruciform gash in the side of the Pentagon smoldered, everyone went back to work. One roommate and other friends who worked on the Hill vacillated between actual and auxiliary offices, sometimes using our apartment as a base.

I headed back to Bethesda to spend hours every day alone in a dark screening room, logging and dubbing film for a documentary about the life of jazz great Dave Brubeck. I watched hours of my boss’ interviews with the musician, his compatriots, and his critics; in one segment that I watched over and over again, Brubeck recalled his years playing the piano in a World War II army band.

“I was getting World War II out of my system,” I remember Brubeck saying, explaining the thrashing, pounding sound of his music during those years. In the days before September 11, I had wondered over this remark.

I did not understand what he meant until I knew my own smoky, sad fall-out days, days when I, too, wondered what any of it meant: why I chose to be so far from my family; why I pursued such a hapless career, why I had broken up with a man who was loving, cocky, but willing to change; and why I often felt so alone in a city brimming with people.

Perhaps especially because I still live in the city where I experienced September 11, and a city that bears its own scars from that day, it has been strange to watch the denouement of “remembrance fever.” Each year, it seems, the festivities grow a bit less grand and a bit less trumpeted: a parade, to a wreath-laying, to a speech sandwiched in among public service announcements.

This year, I did not even realize that it was September 11 until I double-checked the date on a piece of work correspondence. I looked up from my Outlook calendar and stared at the gray felt wall of my cube, remembering that morning of eight years ago as if I were looking in on the life of a younger sister, a woman who was not me.

I recalled, too, an odd moment from high school: an anniversary of Victory over Japan Day when an erratic, elderly school bus driver ferried our high school show choir to an out-of-town performance.

“I bet you kids don’t even know what V-J Day is!” the driver crowed angrily from the steering wheel.

“It’s the day they signed the World War II surrender,” one of the boys shouted back over the roar of the bus’ open windows.

“I bet you didn’t know there are two!” the driver yelled, still oddly incensed and certain that we did not understand our history or all that our forebears had sacrificed.

For a moment in my cube on September 11, 2009, I wondered if the day had become one of those memories that has achieved and spent its first flush of historic decoration. I wondered if it has become now one of those calendar markers that lingers like an awkward guest that has overstayed its welcome.

In a couple of years, the decade anniversaries will begin, likely to be celebrated with all the pomp and circumstance that the soundbite age can muster up. It is strange to think that in another decade or so, the day will likely take its place among the dates that school children memorize and forget and recall most vividly through the stories of the people who love them, and through the prism of their own generation’s pains.