Downstairs, mom is watching another in a seven-year string of 9/11 specials and I went upstairs because I still can't figure out how either tower came down, even though I watched it all happen in class. This one is new, they've compiled video from what people shot that day. The plane hitting the second tower, people jumping out of windows, scared co-eds filing into an elevator because this just might be the end of the world. One clip was a little girl looking out an apartment window, asking her father where the building went. It takes children years to think abstractly. Then there are the people covered in ash after the two buildings came down. They don't react to anything, just walk around in the cloud explaining to one another what just happened. As if the act of saying out loud what you cannot fully comprehend will make it tangible. As if it could ever be anything but completely unreal.
What gets me is the paper. The raining ,ticker-tape parade of paper coming out of the towers. Entire histories falling down. Companies. Just sprinkling down. How the paper is still here but people had to bury wallets and watches.
What isn't on tape is a girl named Olga walking into Mr. Smith's theatre room and saying should could not audition for Medea that afternoon. Her father worked in the 2nd tower (maybe the 1st?) and she had to find out what happened. There was the line of kids, because we did not all have cell phones, waiting to use the office phones because a brother or a father or a sister worked at the Pentagon.
The shirt I wore to school that day said Make Love, Not War. Why is that what I remember?
They cut the feed to news stations after the towers fell. We all had to go back to class. Most teachers gave up teaching, they either put in movies or read aloud from what they could find online. My chemistry teacher asked us to open our textbooks and look at chemical structures. I watched the classroom door and saw Zach's head pop into view. We had an entire conversation in two looks. Mine wondering if he had any news on our other brother, Micah, who was taking his second flight ever, home from Florida and his that everything was fine but Ian was here to take us home. When we got in the car all Ian said was, "aren't you glad Mom made an emergency contact?" We went to his house. Neither of us were hungry but we sat, watched the news and ate the brownies that Maggie had given me that morning. They were awful but at least it was something to do.
This morning on NPR, the news caster speculated as to how many people had PTSD because of 9/11. I suppose that could be true of people who were there. Who lost someone.
I suppose people might still wake up in the middle of the night because of it. I know it took me a while to get back to sleep. But I've always been like that. I never can sleep when something bothers me. Except I did fall asleep watching the news that afternoon. Ian and I both fell asleep on the floor of his apartment. After we finished off the brownies. We had to eat them dry because he had no milk. I remember thinking that he had grenadine, but no milk. He'd just moved out of my parents' house. I know I don't have it as uneasy as it all still makes me. The uneasiness is healthy I think.
When I was very young, I used to have dreams that Dracula was hiding in the bathroom, behind the shoer curtain. That night, when I finally got to sleep, I had the dream again. Only this time it was Osama Bin Laden. I went down stairs after that and watched TV until I fell back asleep. Thankfully, Comedy Central was doing regular programming. No one else was. I should have written them a letter for that.
While we were watching things tonight, my mom told me that she knows things are still ok because children are constantly being born. To her, that's proof that God wants us to go on about our lives.
That made me want to cry too.
I really didn't expect to start crying on the car ride home tonight.
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