Twenty-Five

The alarm blares and I wake up grateful:
That I can work from home today;
That I don't have to commute,
That on this day, I don't have to be in tall buildings.

It's before six this Friday morning
in mid-September twenty-twenty-six
and I'm on-edge, my shifty pupils 
scatter from bed stand to lamp to dresser,
as I count down, pre-processing.

Curl my toes over my bed's rail, 
press my pair of bare soles 
into old growth oak board to tether myself;
lean my lanky torso over in a hunch.

Crouched downward, elbows to knees
I palm my diary, clutch an uncapped pen.
While I don't want to —eyes blurred, liquid —
I push myself:

I recall the last moment of my childhood, 
twenty-five years ago this morning.
When I lost my innocence.
When my embedded ignorance 
began a journey of shedding, winnowing
The day my faux Bubble of Safety burst.

= = = 

I awoke that Tuesday, September 11, 2001
and was grateful that I could 
trek across my dewy grassy campus 
to slurp a bowl of Lucky Charms 
AND bake myself a Belgian waffle, if I wanted,
because my parents weren't here.

And I am seventeen 
And I'm a big, cool college freshman
And I'm in charge
And I'm starting my first Tuesday of classes
And the world is in front of me! 

And I grab the Washington Post
and a new-to-me periodical, the Philly Inquirer 
from the gratis rack paid for by a gracious alumna.
And I check in at the dining hall, 
fresh ID card barcode swiped correctly this time.
And I compile the breakfast I'd been hankering.
And my mind was stuck on: 
How should I organize my new note-taking pens?
I am still a child.

But this changed:

When the first plane hit; 
and the radios announced it on dorm room radio alarm clocks
and my new friend walked into the dining hall
as I was carrying my blue tray to the bussing station,
and she was carrying a verbal 

When she said to me in a haze, 
stumbling over her words 
as if her native tongue was practicing a new language:
"A plane hit The World Trade building" 

Her words numb, yet dire.
And that meant nothing to me, those words;
it sounded important, and the name vaguely familar.
I had no grounding for her distress, her warning.
Still, I shuddered, while nodding back at her:
"Right, right, wow." 

And I am still unaware, naive.
Why is that building name ringing a bell?
It has a basement right? Something about a basement.
My mind tumbled distant memories with new facts, 
trying to polish them, like river rocks, for meaning.

But the thread had been pulled, 
and the unraveling continued:

When, after this weird run-in,
I made my way back to the dormatory
to change for class,
and saw hushed huddles 
of young women forming on the quad.

When my Hall Advisor flagged me down, 
and asked, her eyes wide, her brows tilted:
"Did you hear? Yeah? OK. You have a TV right? Can we come to your room?"
When my room flooded with semi-strangers, even seniors!
Maybe I'll become known as the girl who can throw parties? I wonder.

When the screen went on.

When we saw the smoke billowing.
And the new voices spoke aloud to everyone, no one.
"Oh—no, they got it wrong. That was no small craft news plane." 
"That's big, that hole is so big—"
"That's going to take a long time to extinguish."
"My uncle works on that block —"

When the second plane hit, 
live, in front of us, caught on rolling news cameras,
beamed right into this little attic dormer.

When we watched, 
and watched, 
and watched, 
standing around my roommate's and my
two extra-long twin beds 
that felt now like coffins, 
too long, 
too narrow, 
too close.

When an upper classman mumbled:
"They're gonna need so much blood"
"We'll have to set up a blood drive in the center."
And we nodded, zombie-like,
our trance unbroken.

When I remember that my Aunt is underground 
in New York that morning, 
headed towards the World Trade Center 
for a job opportunity.

When we heard the newscasters. 
When we searched their wild eyes, 
staring back at us, over-the-air, 
on my borrowed 13" TV/VCR combo screen.

When we squinted through the grainy images
to check their horizontal scan line-etched faces for meaning.

"There's reports of a fire at the White House," 
a breaking news alert.
"Oh my God!" someone cried.

My ears perk up. 
The White House?
Several of us hail from the DC Metro region.
Gasps and shocked faces 
layer atop the frozen stares.

When I tried to call my mom
My dad
My sister
And no one answered.

When the newscasters, grim-faced,
recanted the breaking news
only to replace it with a different version, 
"Correction, a plane has hit the Western side of the Pentagon."

When the cell towers jammed
and the Twin Towers burned
and then: 

When 
they 
fell, 
fell, 
fell
but before that, 
the people: 

When
they fell 
fell 
fell
fell.

When the cries, the howls began,
when hallmates and classmates 
could not reach their families. 
And then, when they could.

When my dorm mate stood up at 
a hastily set up open mic in the student center.
The same chairs and mic used 
for our Self Governance Association meetings.
She came forward, to share with us, 
in the Quaker tradition. 

She opened with her name, 
and that her home is in the suburbs outside Manhattan.
That her dad took the Subway 
"...and walked under the Towers every single work day."

And that, 
"All day, I haven't know if my dad was alive or dead."

When the gathered students began rocking, 
shaking, sobbing, in connection, in agony,
she added:

"But this morning, this September morning?"
"Well. The sky was so blue, and he had said to himself, 
'Hey, I'm going to take the ferry. 
'It's too gorgeous a day to be on the train."

Murmurs of "Thank God!" and "Oh my Gosh" 
rippled through the ad hoc assembly.

When she looked at me, 
searing her words into my lungs, my throat: 

"So I got news, finally, from my Mom.
"My Dad will come home tonight. 
"But so many others' dads and moms and brothers, 
their siblings — won't.

She took a beat, 
head tilted up to the rafters; 
puffed her bobbed hair out of her vision.

When my friend, the second-hand survivor, 
she locked eyes with me, 
and it was then, 
there when it happened:

I felt the last gasp of childhood 
leave my body.

"And I'm not OK.
And I won't be for who knows how long.
But I do know that hate is not the way out of this."

She stepped away from the stand;
waved on the next person with something on their mind.

And she was right, 
and at seventeen she'd clocked it.
When we become the worriers
— the checkers on parents,
the constant witnesses to slaughter,
the ones crafting contingency plans,
the keepers of kindness, 
the voices at the mics —
then we are children no more.

That day, four planes fell from the sky
and skyscrapers crumble
and fear seeped in
and summer is over 
and childhood is over
and safety is over
and uncertainty is everywhere
and we're scared, and we're together, alone.


= = = = 

After forty minutes of frantic, insufficient
journaling, I scan my tired phrases 
and unripe sentences that'd 
come forth haltingly, 
though no fault of my sweaty pen.

Twenty-five years 
and I still become paralyzed
stuck in that void 
between grade school and adulthood, 
between We Are the World 
and an overdue 
yet under-baked reckoning.

I stay compressed 
until the undersides of my feet 
ache from prolonged pressure, 
my back rebels; time to move.

As I remove my soles 
from the running board of my bed
indented in them are 
two long, narrow hollows.
These marks in my skin, twin voids 
my body will carry into this day.

Never Forget.