I remember....

i was at work. it was afternoon here. my first reaction was disbelief. then i managed to verify on a US news site. i realized something was up just by how hard it was to connect to US news sites. then it was real. at first...

i felt unreal, numb........ then overwhelmed, devastated, angry all at once.

i emailed a friend in Atlanta who flies a lot. he was safe at work too. verified other folks, asking about relatives etc....

in the days that followed....

the news loop-played full-screen images of the towers going dowwwnnnn... my stomach would go dowwwwwwwn each time. i was exceptionally watching the news during that time - i usually don't, and finally i had to give it up for sanity's sake. they all said the same thing over and over again anyway.

i remember on the way to work, two guys from the middle east sitting across from me, speaking in their language. One pointed to the free mini-newspaper in their lap, which featured a huge picture of the towers in flame... they both burst into fits of what seemed like diabolical laughter. i was supersensitized and maybe they were talking about the weather and laughing normally. but it didn't seem that way to me. and i wanted to eat their heads.

then it occurred to me they could be packed and wired, and... that my bus would blow up. but it would have been too small a target.

i felt isolated.

i was in a culture that largely did not understand. i could not talk to anyone... they said awful things, the news said awful things... the politicians said AWFUL things... i couldn't hear it any more. the national pastime was this sickening debate about "whether it was the US' fault." ugh.

i felt fearful.

despite the rotten majority of attitudes around me were (solidarity? what's that ), i was in an allied country that had received threats for second-round of attacks.

i had to travel areas that would have been ideal targets and there, i was terrified. i remember having to forcibly move my mind onto other thoughts, very difficult ... but i wanted to prevent those terrorists at least from having added victory via my own mind.

i remember living in the shadow of this for an undetermined amount of time thereafter. as did, i think, in one way or another, most of the western world.



~ waves ~