the entry i never wrote, then.

[ursamajor]

Five years ago, just before 9 am, I puttered off to the bath; it was a hot September Tuesday morning and I didn't have to be at work until 10. I'd been chatting with theducks and kudzita and several others since the sun had woken me earlier, golden dawnlight through my window warming the walls and drawing me out of bed hours before I had to be at work.

I'm not sure I can do justice to my feelings when I read scrollback and followed the links to CNN - how much the world I lived in would be affected in those 20 minutes while I sat in the tub, washing my hair in the late-summer sun. I called my dad on the west coast, and he was already awake, reading the morning paper whose news had just been catastrophically eclipsed. My mom was supposed to fly home from visiting a friend in Hawaii that morning; she would remain there over another week until the planes were ungrounded. And then I started IMing and emailing everyone I knew. The phone lines were overwhelmed, as were many larger websites, but messaging and email were still functional.

I remember putting off going to work as long as possible; walking to, and turning right around when I got there. I remember passing a couple of tourists on the street near Fenway Park on my way home, wondering aloud at the quiet, and breaking the news to them. I remember coming home to the studio I'd moved into barely two months previous, and learning that in the 45 minutes I'd been gone, both towers had fallen.

Two months before, the 4th of July in NYC with theconvictor and slwands and mamdvany and P+J, how we'd almost gone down to the WTC, but decided not to because of the lines, and instead, I would come back on a less touristy day to visit a couple of months down the road. Now feeling shaken by my audacious assumptions.

Being unnerved by the quiet, broken occasionally by an F-14 zooming by overhead; the TV news on softly in the background. That as day faded into night, everyone's windows kept dark, because if we were there, we were glued to CNN and the internet, our faces illuminated by the neon electric glow of the screen, or we were sitting in the dark, lost in thought, not realizing the sun had set a long while ago. I put candles in the window to chase away the shadows, sharing light with the small flames of others holding a vigil in the park.

During those days, we zipped emails and IMs back and forth asking about each others' safety, knowing we weren't okay but that being safe was the best we could hope for right then. Links flying by and scrambling to read them, hoping to make sense of this. Impromptu check-in sites put online as fast as they possibly could be, relief when someone checked in with good news and several more names to be marked off as safe, but that pit in your stomach sitting there as other names remained open. No news. No word. And when the news finally came - how piercing, that her last written words were of seeing a rainbow from the 99th floor where she worked.

I went back to work later that week; I joined a choir again a few weeks later. I sang at various memorials; at one of them, I got a phone number on a napkin from a boy for the first time ever. If anything, I travelled more that winter, spending time with those I loved in faraway places. I went down to New Haven, twice. I went home for Christmas, then up to Portland and Seattle to visit West Coast friends, and rang in the new year in Vancouver chez pukajen; on the way home, we stopped at a steakhouse, and thanks to prime_meridian and ascian3 and sleipnir, I finally understood what delicious steak could be. I started a long-distance relationship with a guy in DC thanks to geebee_x, and flew into National multiple times, becoming quite familiar with the DC flight restrictions; he actually made the first visit, on a chilly January winter weekend; returned for Valentine's Day a few weeks later; continued to come see me. All of us seeking connection with those we loved; all of us freshly reminded how fragile it all was. And at the end of that winter, I visited danialindenberg in New York (with Ingrid and Angie and Marvin), and we met up with Michelle and Peter and went down to Ground Zero to pay our respects, and for the first time, I stood at the base of the Towers-That-Were, and gazed up into the sky, following the shafts of blue light as they trailed high into the clouds, imagining what could have been.

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