The man who took my ticket to St. Petersburg's Florida International Museum pointed the way into the exhibit on 9/11. He made a jab at a welcome.
"I'm wishing I could say, "Enjoy,' but I don't know what to say." His voice rose in an odd, tentative fashion. "Reflect," he said, then disappeared.
Before me was a display of 28 photographs and an even larger display of written messages and drawings from around the world, many of them from children and composed right after the attack.
In the colorful, awkward drawings, the faces were always stained in black or blue teardrops. One drawing of ground zero even included a tiny man falling out of a building. The man's hair was flying away from his head and pointing to the ground.
Among the letters was one from a 6-year-old Australian boy writing to Santa. He said he didn't want toys for Christmas. He wanted America to get better.
Has America gotten better? Are we healed, and stronger, or still hurting?
I met a man and his wife at the exhibit, George and Nancy Sandoval. George sells cars. They live in Largo. They took the day off to see the exhibit. They felt, as George Sandoval said, "compelled to."
One by one, they moved in to look closely at the photos - of a flag-covered body being pulled from the debris, of a policeman digging by hand in the dirt, of firefighters looking out with every emotion registered on their dust-covered faces.
I don't want to talk down the exhibit. But I wish the project - put together by the U.S. Diplomacy Center, the State Department and the Museum of the City of New York - was larger and contained more photographs.
The Sandovals seemed to agree. "It's like you never get sick of hearing about it," Nancy Sandoval said. "Maybe it's a way of feeling consoled."
I'm with her.
Like every American I have seen these pictures, or pictures like these, so often they should leave me unmoved. Yet they never lose their power. The photographs rivet me and redefine any idea I had of the impossible coming to pass. If I look at those pictures often enough, maybe the impossible will become real. I will eventually make peace. Maybe that's how things are supposed to work.
After the Sandovals left, a man named Kenneth Bryan entered the exhibit with his brother-in-law, Mark Feltis. The two men had been to New York together, had visited the World Trade Center in the years when it was the city's No. 1 landmark, towering above all else. They still have that memory, clashing with the pictures of 9/11.
"You never get over it," Feltis said.
That day two years ago had brought him to tears. He cried in the shower, where no one could hear. "What the hell have they done to us now?" he said. "And if they can do this to us, they will do anything."
Will they? And what would be worse than an attack on the World Trade Center? An attack on the White House? The Golden Gate Bridge? Yosemite? Your child's school?
Two years have passed. The questions crackle, suspended, unanswered. We are stuck in permanent unease.
The children's letters on display were housed in a few glass-topped cases. One last case was covered by a roll of white paper. Visitors were encouraged to write their own messages, to be passed along as the exhibit moves on to its next stop.
Only a few had been left.
"The rage doesn't go away," one writer said without leaving a name. "The respect for the firemen remains."
A man from Ecuador wrote about a day when people would know no borders and there would be no tragedies like this one.
I asked the Sandovals, the couple from Largo, if they were going to leave a message. They didn't know what to say, they said.
There is nothing wrong with such silence. It might be quite appropriate.
Silence is part of paying reverence and a trip to that exhibit is a small act of reverence for 9/11. Go if you can. The exhibit runs until Oct. 12.
