where were you when

the day before I stood in horror as his body was thrown about thirty feet across Oxford Street, right in front of our house. someone was speeding. someone later told me it was becoming a problem, people speeding through these residential streets. something to do with drugs. and, Scooby, who never needed a leash was a few steps into the road when the car came blurring through.

we rushed him to the vet and, except for a few astonishingly minor abrasions, he was pronounced fine. we were told to keep an eye on him overnight. according to xrays, he didn't appear to have any injuries. miracle. but that night, we kept an eye open and payed no attention to sleep.

the next morning, he was fine. same old Scooby. I happily, yet still worrying, got in my car and began driving to my morning rehearsal with Judy Dworin Performance Ensemble. Every Tuesday and Thursday at 9:30. Trinity College.
I flipped radio stations and, finding no good songs, left it on a station that was breaking down the morning news. It was background chatter. I heard something about a plane crash. Whatever I heard, it was far away in my awareness. Enough information to feel a moment of quick prayer, the way I do when an ambulance whirs by me. Someone is in crisis and my small, simple prayer is all I can think of to do. Send a blessing.

I entered the dance studio and the other company members were talking about the plane crash. It had crashed into the World Trade Center. The gravity of the situation slowly seeped in. Very slowly. "How horrible," I thought, "a plane crashing...all those people on board." wait. "into the world trade center? Into a building?" No.

worse.

All of us decided quickly that we needed more information and we ran over to the cafeteria. Televisions were on and many students were fixated on the moment to moment reports. Workers were busy with a project, running drills and loud power tools. Others were still carrying on with their morning, completely unaware or unfazed that the country was in the midst of irrevocable trauma and change. That didn't last long. at. all.

I stood slack jawed as I watched, on live television, the second plane scream into the other tower. Everything slowed. The hum of drilling continued. My friend, Alicia, usually mild mannered, sweet and fairly quiet, hurled her panic at the workers and yelled at them to stop their noise. Her fiance worked across the street from the towers. He commonly walked through the buildings or went upstairs into them. It wasn't unusual for him to be in them. The black billows of smoke engulfed the buildings. Everything was silent. A full inhale with no sign of an exhale.

The crying and screaming came when the tower buckled and fell like a shadow sliding quickly away from the sun's glare. The reality of what had just happened was ungraspable. There was no way to comprehend that an entire building full of people had, in the space of a breath, dissolved into a cloud of ash. gone.

then.
worse.

The second tower broke and crumbled with the speed of a match. poof. gone.

my brain struggled to add it up. what. is. happening? what am I seeing? what do I do? No instinct came. No urge to run. No urge to fight. Nothing. Just still. Sometimes things move so fast that they hardly seem to be able to move at all. That was my brain.

And that is as much as I remember of that day. The moment that the trauma locked itself into my cells. At some point, I knew that another plane went down in a field somewhere. Pennsylvania? And, yet another plane, crashed into the Pentagon. I knew that I had the thought that this was the end of all of us. That plane after plane after plane would find it's way into every innocent and unsuspecting place. I knew that the world had gone mad, but I didn't know how or why. I couldn't begin to fathom that another human being would or could orchestrate something like this. I hadn't yet grasped the capacity for atrocities. not first hand. or, at least, not like this.

and why?

I don't know how I got home. I have no memory of driving my car, greeting my fiance' or calling my mother to see if she was okay and to tell her that I was okay. I know that I did. I know that I had the thought that maybe this was just New York and DC and Pennsylvania and that maybe other equally terrifying events were happening in the country but the media was so preoccupied with these places, no one yet knew. I know that I went to a church, alone, and sat and held hands with strangers and cried and cried and cried. I know I hugged the woman next to me, who was about my age, as she told me how afraid she was for her family member who is. who was. who, who knows...was a firefighter in the city and she didn't know yet. we held each other and cried and sang songs and said prayers from many different traditions. Ministers, preachers, rabbis, imams, gurus, you name it....everyone was there to pray. I don't know why I was there alone, without my fiance. I don't know.

the story of my story, as is true for everyone, continued. Our country changed. Our innocence taken. And, of course, our rights, our truths, our trust, our healing. All taken. We've been corralled into a culture of fear and suspicion, exploited in our trauma and hypnotized to follow with blinders on. There is trauma on top of trauma on top of trauma. In so many ways, so much healing remains. There is so much still frozen in the glaciers of this shock. When people tell their story, it is alive and frightful as ever; there is very little indication that we have regained our movement and vitality. There is so much to thaw, then grieve, then rage at, then grieve some more. may we all have the blessing of that healing. May those who were taken be at rest and at peace.