WHERE WERE YOU WHEN THE WORLD CHANGED?
WHERE WERE YOU WHEN THE WORLD CHANGED?
What shape would the world be now? What shape would your world be?
Where were you when it happened?
Nobody can forget the precise moment. Where were you when JFK was shot?
Maybe you were at home. Maybe you were a supply teacher. Teaching just for a day at a time. Waiting for the term to start. Waiting for the morning papers. Maybe you were sat on your sofa, wearing your dressing gown or your shorts. Maybe you were eating breakfast in the middle of the afternoon, or first thing in the morning. Maybe your breakfast had gone cold, the milk dissolving the cereal until it resembled a soggy mush. Maybe you saw the newsflash in the afternoon after Neighbours had finished.
Maybe you just looked out of the corner of your eye as you were doing the washing up. Maybe you saw flames licking the side of the building. Maybe you didn�t really know what was happening. Maybe nobody did.
Maybe two planes had struck two buildings. Maybe it was an accident, maybe two. Maybe the odds against them happening as accidents are incalculable. Maybe.
Maybe they weren�t accidents.
Maybe you were at your lovers. Maybe you were curled into her arms, catching stolen moments with her whilst someone kept dialling the same eleven numbers over and over again into a keypad. Maybe, after you�d made love that morning with your mistress, and you switched on your mobile phone, the first thing you heard was your wife�s frantic, screaming voice, trying to find out where you were. If you were alive. Maybe you told her that you were in the office. Maybe there wasn�t an office anymore. . Maybe this was the time you realised your marriage was did not have a future.
Maybe you were a bestselling author. Maybe you were sat at your desk one morning, plotting out a new blockbuster novel. Maybe you�d already titled the novel. Maybe it was called Fatal Impact. Maybe not. Maybe you�d worked out that terrorists hijacking two planes and flying them into the heart of Numbers 1 and 2 World Trade Center was too far-fetched even for your latest CIA adventure, let alone real life. Maybe you�d thought about it. Maybe you�d worked out it�s feasibility. Maybe it was feasible. Maybe you thought it was infeasible.
Maybe you were wrong. Maybe you dropped your coffee in shock as the information � too big to be processed, too shocking to be understood � finally entered your mind.
Maybe you were sat at your desk. Maybe you were at work. Maybe you were working on the 86th floor of World Trade Center Number 1. Maybe there was some godawful noise below you. Maybe the building shook. Maybe you dialled 911. Maybe you didn�t realise when you woke up this morning that it would be your last.
Maybe you were in the reception of the World Trade Center. Maybe you wondered what that noise was at 9:15am. It sounded like the workmen in the basement dropping a dumpster full of gold. That�s what it sounded like. Some huge, dull, clanging noise. Maybe it didn�t sound like a commercial airliner impacting the 86th floor at several hundred miles an hour, laden down with several tanks of fuel, and hundreds of terrified commuters. Maybe you wondered why the building shook the way it did. Maybe it was an earthquake. Maybe not.
Maybe you wondered why the dust fell from the ceiling. Maybe you thought nothing was wrong. Maybe you thought that in an hour and thirty minutes the World Trade Center would still be there. Maybe you didn�t realise how serious it was until the forecourt outside the reception began to thud with the multiple impact of objects flung from above. Bodies.
You remember where you were when JFK died : if you were alive. You remember where you were the moment Princess Diana died. You remember where you were the moment your world changed. The moment all our worlds changed.
The moment that the World Trade Center collapsed in upon itself. The moment a thousand conspiracies and a thousand foreign policies were born.
When all the things we took for granted, all the things that we used to take as a given, were taken away. When the security, the stability of our lives, vanished, disappeared, collapsed in on itself, as if it was never there. As if there was no tomorrow, and for some of us, there wasn�t, isn�t, never going to be a tomorrow.
Maybe you think you were lucky, being one of the survivors. You only walked over the bridge, one of the thousands, the millions of shellshocked, the stunned, the anathetised, walking silently across the water, unable to breathe, caked in dust, in ashes, in remains, your eyes streaming, not only with tears but with the grit and the dirt in your eyes, your breath gasping and stolen, your skin caked in layers of debris, in every pore and orifice. Nostrils. Ears. Fingernails. Mouth. In your soul.
Maybe you walked back to your apartment or your flat. The windows blown in, the world, your world, covered in ashes and rubbles and the meat of your loved ones.
Maybe you unlocked the front door. Maybe you picked up the phone to find there was no dialling tone. Maybe all you wanted to do was found out how many of your friends were dead. And to tell the so-called lucky ones that you weren�t.
Maybe you curled around a vacuum where they used to be and will never be again. As you tried to sleep in this bed that is now too big. This black hole in our hearts. This fear we call our lives. This is our world now.
Maybe we sat down at the end of the day, all across the world. Maybe we sat down and watched. And watched. And watched. Maybe we couldn�t take our eyes away from it. Hypnotised by the horror, but somehow hoping, subconsciously, to dull ourselves to the pain, to anasthetise ourselves through exposure. Try to build up a tolerance to the horror, like a junkie who always needs more, more, more. More relief, more comfort. Less pain. Anything to make the world hurt less. But if it hurt less, if these images could no longer shock and awe, what would we become? Would we be less human? Would we be more than animals?
These murders, these 3,000 exiting souls, to some will be nothing more than a statistic now. The news is just another show. The taste of fear. The time I feel most alive is the time I do not die. When I defy my own mortality. When I survive again.
How we are judged is not by how we live, but by how we die. We, the survivors, we are not the lucky ones. We, who will lose friends, who will lose lovers, lose our lives. We who will survive.
Maybe when we close our eyes we see the things that no one should ever see. Maybe we see disembodied limbs exploding against glass skylights. Maybe we see two planes, one after the other, dissecting two of the most beautiful buildings in the world with all the apparent casuality of an envelope entering a postbox. Maybe we see a flower of incendiary flame blossom and wither in a short few seconds. Maybe we see the confusion, the calculation of the odds by which two such accidents could have happened in such a short time, maybe we see the realisation that this, this was no accident.
Maybe when we close our eyes we see a world that has changed. And we too, changed. And we must change to live in this new world. We must no longer think of ourselves as the first world, but merely as part of one world. This, all of this, is our world, and maybe if mankind is to have a future, we should try to change it.
� copyright Mark Reed, August 2003
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� copyright Mark Reed, 1991-2003 except where indicated