Five years ago

(Warning: contains some strong language)

Was it really only five years? It must have been a century or more in the past, mustn't it? And yet, when I lay my head down on my pillow last night, it all came back as though it were yesterday morning.

My house was still new to me. At the start of this new millennium, I had attempted to start a new life, as well. Having lived in so many different places and found nothing to help me rest, I had packed my struggles, my sorrows, the strangeness of my own imagination, and I had come home to deal with them.

I have always had trouble sleeping in a quiet house. I can hear every creak and groan of floor boards shifting as the night temperature drops. I imagine I can hear giant spiders within the walls dancing and weaving and conspiring to walk across me while I rest. I note each time a piece of plaster breaks loose and rattles toward the basement. I sense the faintest breeze shaking the branches of the maple trees out front. I hear every leaf fall.

At the end of every summer, when the rattling, humming air conditioner no longer runs all night, I struggle to sleep in stillness. The summer of 2001, I had surrendered. That Sunday night, I had unintentionally fallen asleep with the television on, and had heard nothing but the white noise of infomercials in the wee hours. For the first time in years, I slept easily. I decided it might be wise to leave on the little thirteen-incher the next night, to see if, indeed, it was that which had allowed me to sleep.

Monday night turned into Tuesday morning. I had gone all night without waking. I was blissful! As the sun shone through my window, I rolled over and offered some tasty treats to the cats, and began to listen to the morning news... NBC's "Today" was coming in loud and clear. They interrupted their program to inform us that it appeared an airplane had crashed into one of New York City's tallest buildings, and they would have more information as it came to them.

Morning news is supposed to be about small things -- politics, medical breakthroughs, Hollywood celebrities touting their latest projects, and the occasional automobile pile-up on the Eisenhower Expressway or along some other highway. It isn't supposed to have an airplane ploughing into a building at the start of a business day.

A building like that would be hard to avoid missing. It was big and skinny, with a whole lot of other sky around it a plane could go through without coming into contact with that glass and steel. It couldn't have been an accident. But that can't be right. That didn't make sense.

I couldn't figure out what kind of joke, what nightmare I was suffering. I lay back down and closed my eyes, waiting to wake up for real.

It would seem I was not alone. Nearly the entire world was asleep, that morning.

I opened my eyes again, stared at the unchanged screen in disbelief, as the smoke billowed up and aside. Only a second passed, I thought. I almost missed it. To this day, I am sorry I didn't. I heard Katie Couric's voice: "Oh my Go-od!" That was the second plane.

I wasn't thinking what Katie was thinking. I had gone from shock to cold fury the instant the second impact occurred. All rational thought was forced out, expelled in a fricative past a rage-curled lip. "Fffffffffff. Fffuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuckfuckfuck."

And then the dread came.

Mom. Dad. They needed to know we were at war.

Dressing hastily and grabbing my cane, I marched the two blocks to their house. Neither was at home. Tuesday. Mom is grocery shopping, Dad is... Dad could be anywhere. I turned on their television, green tint and all, and sat down to wait for Mom to return from the supermarket. I didn't have long to wait -- about three minutes later, she came in, saying she'd heard at the store that a plane had crashed in New York. I held up two fingers. I don't know what my face looked like, but I can't imagine it was anything but hardened.

She didn't even put away the groceries. She stared at the TV for a long time,trying to figure out who could hate so greatly. She thought it might be more of those bastards like Timothy McVeigh. I said, no, home-growns would go for government property, for a national landmark, like the Statue of Liberty or the Brooklyn Bridge or... anyway, this had to be foreign in origin, I told her. Like those sons of bitches who tried it before. Remember? She shook her head, but she remembered. We weren't ready for more talk. Every channel was tossing out guesses. It kept coming back to the sons of bitches who bombed the Trade Center before. Al Qaeda? is that who they were? Long, tangled silence between Mom and me as we stared at Fox 's Shep Smith and the giant plumes of smoke behind him.

"Your dad's working in your back yard." (Why hadn't I looked there?) "I'm going to have to go tell him." She strode out the door as though clad in bright armor and bearing a cross. Only twenty feet from the house, she seemed so far away I had a sudden flash of dread that she might never return. "What if?" kept playing itself over and over in my head.

And then the news came, an explosive, fiery crash into the Pentagon. Threats of the White House being targeted. Good God, my sisters, my brother-in-law, my niece and nephew are all right there on the mall in D.C., and some piece of shit is trying to kill them! Hurry home, Mommy, this is important! Collapsing buildings, collapsing sanity... and it keeps getting worse.

No more words. No more thoughts. The world is a jagged-edged jumble under crisp blue skies.

By noon, all flights were grounded. In all my years, I had never seen a sky without jet vapor trails, before. Was this what my great-great-great grandmother saw when she looked up beyond the white man's prairie camp? How did she face the terrible change in her world?

It took me a month before I could weep, and then I could not stop weeping for days.



I still sleep with the television on. But it is not yet again the unbroken sleep it was five years and a day ago.