After The Twin Towers Fell: Real Reflections

The 25th anniversary of 9/11 has come and gone.

But the terrorist attack was not a 1-day event.

For weeks after the Twin Towers fell, we felt a welter of emotions: Sorrow. Rage. Numbness. Uncertainty.

Westporters wanted to help, in any way they could. Some volunteered at Ground Zero. Some tended to victims’ families. A few joined the military.

Alexis Liistro, in Staples’ Class of 2002 yearbook.

Alexis Liistro was a senior at Staples High School. Her younger sister Samantha was a freshman. Alexis took her out of school.

After they finally got hold of their parents, the sisters headed to Compo Beach.

Across Long Island Sound, they saw the destruction unfolding. Smoke filled the horizon.

A quarter century later, Alexis remembers how peaceful the water was.

“We were standing on this pristine, familiar beach where everything felt strangely safe and still, while not very far away something almost incomprehensibly horrific was happening,” she says.

“I looked across the Sound, and tried to reconcile those two realities. How could the water be so calm and beautiful, when there was so much horror just beyond it?”

A calm day at Compo Beach (Photo/Justin Reed)

That fall, in her Graphic Design class, that memory became the foundation for a piece.

A friend had an older photograph of the New York skyline, and gave it to Alexis. She was learning Photoshop, and experimented with the image.

She removed the World Trade Center from the skyline — but left the towers visible, in the Hudson River’s reflection.

That became the message: “Gone … but never forgotten.”

Alexis Liistro’s image.

“The towers are physically absent from the city, but they remain in the water,” Alexis explains.

“At the time I was thinking about the people our community had lost, including parents of kids I knew, and about the idea that someone’s physical absence does not erase their presence from our lives. The reflection became a way of representing memory.”

Alexis’s piece became part of 2 fundraisers: one by the Staples High Art Club, the other by the Key Club. Both raised money to help families affected by the attacks.

Twenty-five years later, Alexis says, “the image affects me differently. At 17, I was trying to make sense of something that I didn’t have the life experience or vocabulary to fully comprehend.

“I wasn’t trying to make some grand statement about history. I was trying to express what I had actually felt standing beside my little sister at Compo Beach that day: the surreal coexistence of extraordinary beauty and unimaginable horror, separated only by a stretch of peaceful water.

Alexis Liistro, today.

Looking at it now, she says, “I think that is why the reflection still feels meaningful to me. Twenty-five years have passed. The skyline changed. We grew up. Families learned how to continue living with people missing from them. An entire generation has been born that has no memory of September 11 at all.

“But the reflection is still there.

In a way she could not have understood when she created it, Alexis says, “that may be what remembering actually is. The world continues above the surface, but what was lost remains reflected beneath it.”

Alexis now lives and practices intellectual property law in San Francisco.

But — like 9/11 itself — her image of the New York City skyline, and the gone-but-not-forgotten Twin Towers, lives on.