2001-09-12 - 3:14 a.m.

A warning beforehand, my imagination gets rather detailed, and in a horrible situation like this, it goes a little to the extreme, so while I'm keeping out as many details as I can from my own thoughts, there is only so much I can hold back. I may be wrong, or I may be right. But I've been told I can touch people with my words, and today, I'm not sure if you want me to. It might hurt. I hope I'm wrong. I hope I'm full of myself, and this is just another diary entry about the attack. For once I'm not sure I want to reach people, I'm worried what I might do. But I have to say it.

I know I'm just another person writing about this, you can't find a diary around here any more that doesn't have something about it, but you know, it's what I have to talk about.

My world has been forever changed. Jets crash far enough away that they aren't even in the same region of the country as me, and everything changes. Three buildings that have been there, unaltered, seemingly forever in my world, have been forever altered. The World Trade Center is gone. GONE. They were there when I went to bed. I went to sleep, and it was there, hundreds of miles away and completely out of my mind. I didn't have to think about it. It was doing its World Trade Center things, being World Trade Center-y, and happily not involving me at all.

Then, at 9, I woke up to try my hand with the stock market, as I tried yesterday, but practically nothing happened (I made a total of 79 cents). I open a few business news release sites and watch and wait. I was getting business news left and right, but hadn't seen anything about it yet. I didn't hear anything about it yet, but I noticed, for some reason, nothing seemed to be happening with the stock market itself. I was just waiting… and waiting…

That's when I got the ICQ message, "what the hell is wrong with this world!" At the suggestion of the person who sent me that message, I turned on CNN, and there it was, like a shot from a movie, a CNN announcer standing in front of the scene, in the distance, as smoke poured out of the gaping holes in the towers. And that footage that they've already shown so much and will so many times to come came on, as the Boeing 767 came from the right, swerved to the left, and a ball of flame pushed through the building as easily as a high diver through a pool of water. I collapsed on the couch in shock. Goosebumps rippled over my skin and my jaw dropped in horror. I stared, unblinking, at the television. Finally, I came back to my room where my computer sits, and back and forth I went, to the television every time I heard something more.

I stared in shock where the south tower had been standing, when it was still a plume of dust and the man on CNN didn't even know if the building had collapsed or if there was another bigger explosion. I could tell from the nature of the cloud of dust, there was no building standing beneath it. That wasn't smoke, that was dust, that building had fallen. My legs felt weak and I had to sit down again. And moments later they showed the footage again, and it was official, the south tower was gone.

Shortly after I was bounding out to the living room again to see a pointed splinter of building sticking out of a cloud of smoke where the north tower used to stand. The live footage was split between Manhattan and Washington, showing us the dust cloud rubble that was the World Trade Center north and south towers, and the collapsed hole in the side of the Pentagon. I couldn't believe it. These buildings, staples of the American lifestyle, things that no grown person who's grown up in our society can help but recognize, were either forever changed, or just plain gone. The twin towers, emblems burned into every film with a Manhattan skyline, featured in the one episode of the Simpsons that will probably never be shown again, known by everyone to just be there, isn't any more.

Still in a state of disbelief, at noon I still had to force myself to get up off the couch and get ready for work. Showered, dressed, and ready to go, I started the half hour walk into work, as my plans to go get a tire repair kit for the flat tire on my bike were hindered today by a desperate *need* to watch the news.

As I walked, people looked at me strange from cars as I ranted to myself, trying to get my mind around the fact that it had actually happened. I didn't even bother trying to understand all of those people who were killed, my mind wasn't ready to accept that. More it just thought about the fact that it was so sudden, and completely irreversible. This wasn't a movie, you can't rewind this. It wasn't a video game where you can just Load Game and try again. You can't go back and say "oh, they're going to attack, good to know" and blow it out of the sky with an F-16 over some forest somewhere. It was too late. It had happened, and there wasn't a damned thing anyone could do about it but try to pick up the pieces. The footage of the buildings crashing down played in my head more times on that walk than all of the news channels combined could have shown it in a day. Occasionally my mind would leap into that of one of the people trapped inside, listening to the deafening rumbling of the upper floors rushing toward mine, or stuck in a burning office, filling with smoke, listening to the creaking of the building, preparing to fall, and feeling the terror it would take for me to decide that leaping out of a window hundreds of feet in the air was a better choice than staying there.

I saw images in my head of the people hitting at the bottom, their bodies not hitting limply like a rag doll, but breaking like a ventriloquist dummy slammed against a wall. A rag doll is the one simile I've heard the most to describe a person falling like that, but the great thing about a rag doll is that it can take it. It's not hurt, it just hits and stops, then when you pick it up, it looks the same as it always did. These people didn't end up like that. Then as I thought about it more, I realized that neither simile worked. Because it wasn't going to be clean and soft like a rag doll, and it wasn't going to be broken up in small, easy-to-sweep pieces like the dummy. These were people, actual human bodies with skin and bones and blood. These were people who were essentially hit by a giant slab of asphalt moving at about a hundred miles an hour. No, worse. It wasn't like they were being hit by it, it was like they were thrown at it. There was going to be no recoil, nothing to absorb the blow but themselves. Crushed by their own mass, they wouldn't be alive long enough to see the building falling on their very bodies moments later. Suddenly I found myself in the mind of one of those people, hurtling to my death, praying that maybe, just maybe, I would survive the fall somehow. I would saw the ground rushing toward me, rubble all around and then, as I imagined my head turning away, it stopped in a flash of red and I was back on the road, walking to work in Maine, not there any more, but still touched by it. Finally I stepped into work, not exactly sure what I'd find.

It's odd to see how much this effected things at work. I wasn't sure, given the generally closed-off environment of my workplace, how well the morning workers would know what had happened. But, of course, they all knew already. None of them, fortunately for them, saw the terrible images of the buildings collapsing on themselves, but they all knew about it.

What really shocked me was when Carrie, the team leader, turned to me and said, "We were attacked?" I didn't understand how anyone could not know. Four crashed and hijacked jets, three major buildings hit by them, two of them (at the time) utterly destroyed, and somehow someone didn't know about it. Someone who wasn't at work until four and a half hours after the first jet hit, and she didn't know yet. It was obvious to me later that she hadn't grasped yet just how serious it was when she said "Maybe the terrorists will bomb my car so I can get a new one." I don't blame her for it, she'd been awake only an hour and had just heard about it. She understood better later.

Around two o'clock I went into the cafeteria to get some coffee. Jeff, the company's COO, had brought a portable TV in there from the training department. Normally that room has its little groups of friends who always go on lunch or breaks together sitting at various tables eating and gossiping, maybe reading the newspaper or a magazine. Today there were no discernible groups. Just one. The Camden National Corporation group. It consisted of all eleven people who were in that room at the time, and they were all doing the same thing. Circled around the television, they stared. Occasionally one would turn to another, shaking their head and saying something like "I can't believe someone would do something like that," but mainly silent, mouths open just a bit, watching Peter Jennings on ABC retelling the story again. The screen was small, the reception was fuzzy, but that didn't stop us all from standing or sitting around it, some of us holding untouched cups of coffee, some with opened, uneaten food on the table, some just there to watch, and listening to the story that I already knew too well, and many of them were hearing from an actual news source for the first time since they got to work. I shared a knowing look of disbelief with a red-haired man with a goatee and glasses whom I've only spoken to once, but see almost every time I go for coffee. He'd obviously been pulled in, the same as me. He stood, holding his "Wild Card Poker" paper coffee cup, thumb over the lid, unopened, untouched, and took it in as best he could.

Having already taken longer than planned, I walked with my coffee back to the Item Processing department. There the owner of the stereo we normally use to listen to bad pop stations long after everyone else has left the building, asked us as she left if we wanted it over there so we could listen. I hadn't heard it before because of the check sorters, but I could hear the unmistakable mumble of a quiet talk radio news show. Carrie looked around the room quizzically, as if to ask us all if we wanted to hear it. Most of us nodded to her, we wanted to know about it. And so she moved it toward us, setting it up so everyone could hear.

There was an eerie feeling about it as we listened, attempting to keep working, too. Eyewitnesses told their stories and Mayor Giuliani gave his condolences to a badly shaken city, state, and country under the *clickclickwhirr* of adding machines and keyboards.

*clickclick* "--will never be forgotten—"

There was one long thing I tried in vain to add up. The 65 items, spread across three deposit tickets, just didn't seem to come out right as I listened to an reporter who made it as close as he could—about 10 blocks away—to the towers after they'd fallen.

*whirrclickclickwhirr* "—could taste the dust on my tongue—"*clickwhirr*"—saw a cop car nearby absolutely caked in dust—"*whirrwhirr*

Still trying to get it to come out right, I heard a reporter come on and ask the guy, still on the scene, a few questions.

*clickclickclick* "—does it look like now?" *whirrclickwhirr* "—'s such an odd scene. Everyone is out on the street and the sidewalks, but there are no cars on the streets—" *clickclickclick* "people are listening to radios, couples are hugging each other, saying how happy they are the other is okay—" *whirrwhirrwhirr* "—looking on where the World Trade Center was—"

This was where I stopped. Stopped paying attention to the radio for a bit, stopped typing on the calculator, just stopped everything. I just kind of moved to this bubble where nothing was happening for a few seconds. Just long enough to regroup. For some reason, this kept coming back to me as the most significant thing here. The fact that you could use that phrase, "where the World Trade Center was" kept hitting me in the chest. Not so much like a ton of bricks as much as like a tightly packed, ten-thousand pound pillow. It hit me so hard my chest literally would cave in a bit, my breath would be forced out, but I wouldn't be in pain. Hit hard enough to make me unable to notice anything else, but not hard enough to let it physically hurt. Where it was. Yesterday, Manhattan would have been "Where the twin towers *are.*" Today it's where they *were.* WERE! Not are, were! In my world, they have always been there, and were supposed to always be there. And now they aren't. Two knifepoint attacks resulting in full-scale assaults on the country, and they were no longer there.

At four o'clock it was time for me to go eat. I wanted to hear more, but I needed food. And so I headed to the Market Basket, not really looking around much, just letting the thoughts rush through my head. I bought my food, barely noticed it happening, and was on my way back. Suddenly I stopped on the side of Route 1, halfway back to work. I looked up at the sky and it seemed terribly empty. I mean, it's a small coastal Maine town without an airport, it happens all the time. You can look up at any random time and there won't be a plane in the sky. But to actually look up and realize that because of this there was no chance I'd see one, the complete absence was unnerving. The idea that there *couldn't* be a plane up there felt very wrong. Felt like something was missing, even if there was a good chance it wouldn't be there anyway.

I walked a bit farther, looking up at the sky, when out of the corner of my eye something grabbed my attention. Which is odd because it grabbed it with its complete lack of movement or vibrant color. It seems like I shouldn't have noticed it at all. But I stopped walking and turned away from the road to watch it. Atop a tall white flagpole, an incredibly faded American flag limply hung, motionless. I looked around at the trees, they weren't moving at all. It was almost as if even the wind had stopped to keep this flag from blowing. Like the flag's spirit had died with that of the nation and with all of those people in those buildings. Even when a small breeze picked up, somehow the flag still lay still, almost adamant in its resolve not to move. I eventually kept walking, but couldn't take my eyes off it until I couldn't walk and watch it any more. The curves of the flag, folded in on itself and on the pole, are as sharp in my memory as any photograph. It just seemed so perfect of an image, once proud, but now, still, unable to make its intended impact on the world. Holding still, if just for the moment, to deal with the pressures placed on it before rising again when the next chance comes.

I brought my food back to the cafeteria and started writing a portion of this diary entry. As much as I could in the time I had. Peter Jennings was still speaking on the television, and he talked to a man who'd made it out of the 57th floor of the north tower. I clutched a T-shirt too remind me of someone in New York who was probably clutching a CD case and thinking of me. I wanted to be there (as odd as it is to actually *want* to be in New York right now), holding her, making her feel better, talking her through this day, and mainly just trying to be as far away from it, mentally, as possible. But as I couldn't, all I could do was think about her instead, and write.

People came in, randomly, to pick up things as their day was ending. They would stop and look at the television and ask, "How can people be so hateful?" And I wouldn't have any beginning of a good answer for them.

When I got back, the radio was still playing the news about it. It was a local country station, but it was piping ABC radio straight through so we could hear the news instead. The connection wasn't great, though, so every once in a while it would cut out with a electronic zipping type sound for a second before coming back. Or it would go silent shortly, and a voice would come out sounding far too happy for what was going on, saying "You're listening to ABC radio live on [station numbers] All country station!" then cut back. This had no bearing on what the person on the broadcast had been saying at the time, whether that was important or not, it would just cut in mid-word to remind us of what channel we were listening to it on.

At one point, probably the low point of the evening (not the whole day, just the evening), someone on the radio mentioned giving blood. We got into a discussion about that, about relatives who do all the time, about the odd muscle spasm problem I have in my joints that makes giving blood scary for me, about people's fear of needles. But then Joan piped up. Joan is the kind of woman who rants so much, about so many crazy things, that a crazy ranting man on a city street with a bell and a sandwich board that says, "The End Is Coming" would tell Joan she needed to chill out. She spouts conspiracy theories, talks about religion, politics, Nazis, communism, cigarettes, religion, "Chinamen," "Feminazis," religion, Democrats, environmentalists, and religion. She believes in Creationism and talks about it all the time. She has the most extreme viewpoints I've ever heard on any point ever, and she never stops talking about them. Which is why I was so surprised she hadn't said anything today. All day she'd kept her mouth shut about the whole thing. Then came the discussion of giving blood. And she said that she can't give blood. Because "[somethingsomething] clearly states that a true Christian should never take blood." So according to her, because she's a "true Christian," she can't take blood, and doesn't feel morally right giving it. Shocked and confused as I was, I let that go. I refuse to get into arguments with Joan about this stuff any more, because it's a losing battle every time.

And so I just tried to ignore the blood giving conversation, which quickly stopped. Then, after a bit, someone mentioned something about it being odd that so many schools are closed. They said they understood federal buildings, but why schools?

Joan again. "I don't understand the federal buildings, either! They're done, this whole thing is over, now they're just talking about it because they like to have something to talk about."

WHAT THE FUCK?! NO! They're not "done." It's not "over." They thought it was over when the first jet hit. Then when the second. Now four were down along with as many WTC towers (numbers five and seven had collapsed by then, though I missed that somehow). This was not done, and would never feel done. This was not a "wave of shark attacks," this was not a pop singer crashing because she had too much luggage on her plane. This was not a story because we're desperate for a news story, this is actually very important. This was a legitimate attack on our country, and there is no telling where it's going to fully end. It may be a delay to get us thinking it's over. Tomorrow, as Congress convenes to "show the world we will not falter," or whatever, another jet or bomb or suicidal terrorist could take them out, too. We don't know what will happen next. And that's the scary part, that's why all this stuff is closing down. Because, as Peter Jennings put it, "anywhere where the is a large group of people there is a feeling of vulnerability." Our country no longer feels secure. We can be touched up here on Mount Olympus, and nothing shows that more than two of our largest financial temples being taken to the ground by a bunch of guys with knives. Even if the terrorist attacks have stopped, this is far from over.

Never in my life have I seen so many calls to war. People here want blood and they want it now. They are looking to immediately attack whoever did this. The problem is, we don't know. The more I watch the news, the more frequently the name Osama Bin Laden comes up, but we still don't know it was his fault. We can guess it was his doing, but as of yet we have no proof. And so, people want to go to war with a faceless target. People in Maine have been reported to make threats on U.S. citizens who came from Afghanistan over 18 years ago. We target ourselves because we don't have someone else to target. We don't need to call for blood. We have enough blood as it is, trapped in an incomprehensible amount of debris in lower Manhattan. I'm not saying we should find out who it was and slap them on the collective wrist and tell them not to do it again, oh no. Because I *am* pissed off about this. Whoever it is has attacked my home. My fine, just home, where I am supposed to feel secure and safe and happy in the fact that at least somewhere, people are free from this violence. I want to know who did it, and I want them crushed into the ground. But not at the expense of more innocent lives. War is hurtful for everyone involved, and even those who aren't. So yes, I want the heads of the people who did this. But leave the heads of the people around them alone. And that's the important thing we have to, as a people, remember. It's not the fault of everyone who has ever been against us, it's the fault of a few deranged souls. And they're the ones who deserve to pay.

And finally, I'm going to do something I never would have thought I'd do. I'm going to support George W. Bush. Whatever my beliefs about the man, he is my President. He is the President of the United States. And he is the symbol of our country. In a time of general prosperity, feel free to rock the boat. But at a time like this, when that boat has been hit hard, hold it together, grab a bucket and bail like mad. Don't take time to insult the captain, especially if he's brave enough to stand in harm's way. Bush was in Florida, and he flew back to Washington, D.C. today. He was there about nine hours after the jet hit the Pentagon in an attempt to show that scare tactics were not going to keep our country down. And you have to give the man credit for that.

And now I'm going to sleep. Sleep and be glad that no one I know was near enough to be injured in the attacks.

Even if no one I know is walking away unhurt.