| I had a nice long talk with a friend last night about the Tragedies of September 11th. We talked about how insignificant a thing like that can make you feel. About how you hear people talk about it but you don't believe it until you see it with your own eyes. How it makes you realize how little your problems matter (that you have two tests scheduled for the same day, or you think your boyfriend might be ignoring you) when you see people through a glass screen, tearing through the dusty streets filled with rubble and despair screaming names of lost friends, family, and foes alike, holding old coffee stained pictures and asking that if you see them would you please tell them to call home. How it gave everything a sense of timelessness, like you didn't want to reach out to touch anything. Like a layer of dust from so many miles away blew over on silent wings and settled over everything. Making life as we know it an antique. Making it something we want to preserve so that we do not have to dive into the future and deal with whatever tragedy strikes next. And i went outside, during last period. Just to look at the sky. I saw people, a few, while i was out there. I had asked to go to the washroom, but the last thing i wanted to look at was myself (in the mirror). I wanted to breathe. Normally people move with a purpose. Normally they have set eyes. They laugh with friends. They breathe noisily. But not today. The timelessness stretched out here. For miles around. People sat, they stood, they lay on the field (it was what i did, just to read the clouds for a while) all wearing pained sort of expressions. Aimlessness in their unsmiling faces. In the way that they moved. I saw a fairy (her name is Adele) across the pavement. We glanced at each other, through each other. We did not speak. We did not smile. Did she even really see me? We remained distant. We were trying not to breathe. And when i went inside i sat at my cold, wooden desk. And i wrote poetry all class instead of analyzing short stories. I left behind the task at hand and allowed me to be submerged within myself. I was burried beneath the pressures of a cold, cold world. I looked at those surrounding me. A few you could tell did not care. Most did. Most were like me, trying not to breathe too much (were they trying not to stir the dust as well?). Some people would talk about how they felt, but they wouldn't really. They would not talk about what lurked in the underlying, inside parts of their hearts, but merely state and re-state facts that we all already knew, just trying to make it sink in a little further. But no one knew how to feel. We were all so unstable, unmoving, so silent. I felt like, if i moved to reach out and touch someone else, they would just not be there. Not because they didn't exist, but because we were all drowning so in our emotions that we were cut off from everybody else. (i remember our science teacher took us all down to the library where a tv was set up to watch the news. because no one knew for sure what happened. he told us he thought we would all be dead by monday. we were not, of course. many were, though. many are still dying. it was terrible because there was nothing we could do. we could sit and watch a glass screen show us exactly what we were refusing to believe, and that's all. that was the most we could do, right then. and the first time i saw the footage, like a spider dropping from its web of blue and titanium white cotton to crush the fly, the planes dropped from the sky, i cried.) And here we sit, still. All of us. Trying not to breathe. copyright 02/03/03 back |