on this day

I've attempted not to watch or listen to much news today, but it hasn't worked. I've been trying to cope with the fact that it's been five years since the world stopped and the country burned. This is one of those memories that doesn't seem to get fuzzy with time. I remember too much too clearly from that day.

I was at work, and someone walked past my office and said "Did you hear? A plane hit the World Trade Center in New York." I briefly thought that it was a private plane or something and that it was an accident. Then a few minutes later, someone else walked past my office and said, "Did you hear? A second plane hit the other tower." And then I knew it wasn't an accident.

I started to go a bit numb, and then a third person walked past my office and said, "Did you hear? A plane has hit the Pentagon." People started leaving to pick up their kids from school because the school systems had decided to shut down. Then I started to panic, as my mind went through the following conversation - "Pentagon, government building, close to here, Dad works at NSA, also a government building, close to here, where is Dad?" So I called him at work, and he wasn't there, so on the off-chance, I called him at home, and he picked up. He was sick with a cold or something and hadn't gone to work that day. Sigh of relief, and then pang of guilt. I know where all of my family are - not so for people in NY and DC. Not so for Laura, who walked past me in tears because she had just heard that the fourth plane had gone down in Pennsylvania, and her brother lived in Pennsylvania, and she couldn't get him on the phone.

Someone brought a TV into the lunchroom, and people drifted in to watch. I went in there for water once, because my mouth had gone dry, and that's when the towers fell and people leaned closer to the TV and stood up and put their hands out as if they could keep the buildings from falling, and I watched the TV and my co-workers, and the water overflowed from my cup. Others had radios in their offices, and little groups would gather to listen and hear the same reports over and over again hoping for and dreading new information. The office had gone uncomfortably quiet, and it unnerved me, so I kept working. Panic has taught me that rather than just sit there and shake and let your mind have nightmares, go do something. I got some nasty looks and comments that day - "how can you just sit there and work?!" Because I have to. Because I need to. Because I had flown to Minnesota and back just two weeks earlier, and all this could have happened on that day instead of this one.

Driving home was creepy. It was 5:15 pm, and yet there was no traffic. I didn't see one car on the road during my drive home. I had the radio on for company, and "Bridge Over Troubled Water" came on. I've always liked the song, I think it's beautiful and poetic, and on any other day, it would have put me in a contemplative and meditative mood, but on that particular day, on that creepy drive home, it just made me cry, and I had to pull over to the side of the road for a few minutes until I could see clearly enough to drive again.

That night, I gave in to watching the news all evening and well into the night. One particular image I remember - the firefighters wincing as they saw people jump from the towers to their deaths. It reminded me of reading about the Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire. A bunch of seamstresses were locked into a firetrap of a room at the factory. A fire broke out, and the women couldn't get out because no one came to unlock the door. Several of the women chose to jump, supposedly because they wanted to have some measure of control over their deaths, they couldn't handle the idea of doing nothing. What a choice to make - to knowingly decide the manner of your death and willingly walk toward it. Other, more philosophical, reading tells me that when you are about to die, a part of the brain that is normally dormant suddenly becomes active, and you see and feel things that lead you through the transition, and the one thing you do not feel is fear. Rather, you feel an overwhelming urge to go toward whatever it is that you see - a glimpse of heaven, perhaps. Or a place seen vaguely in your dreams and longed for. Or long-dead loved ones reaching out to you.

I received a number of calls that night - Mom, grandmother, aunts and uncles, college friends. They just wanted or needed to know that I was there and okay, and I guess I needed to know too, as I felt strangely distant and out-of-sync with the day.

Yesterday, I was happily roaming around Renn Fest, meeting the "king," sitting in the hot sun to watch jousting and some bawdy (but hilarious) magic/swordfighting/comedy routines and the end of a rendition of A Midsummer Night's Dream, poking my head into shops and buying a watercolor print of a fairy. And today? Reality returned, and it rained and was chilly, and I went to work and spent all day on one project, and despite my best efforts, I got sucked into the news and commentary about the day's rememberances and ceremonies being politically motivated and the world being more unsafe than it was five years ago, and the bombings that happened in Spain and in London and in other places, and the changing reasons for the war, and Heather called and asked me to lunch tomorrow, and I've forgotten to buy dog treats, but I did remember to give Louise her meds, and five years nudges me and whispers a reminder not to forget any of it, not the mundane, nor the terrible, because it all matters. All of it.