Numb

At some point, I stopped feeling things.

I heard and felt both explosions. I'll never stop hearing that sound in my head, every moment that I realize that they're not there. No Towers, no Building 7, and so on.

I want to go home. Independence Plaza is below Canal, and there's talk of a gas leak in the area.

I want to go home without worrying about the floor going out from under me.

I can't feel sorrow anymore. I already felt it. I saw the Towers collapse, and I thought two things at once:

This can't be happening.
There are rescue workers in there!

People at work were crying, cursing, one was yelling in Hebrew over the phone, probably to his parents.

And I started to slowly cut myself off.

I met my father hours later, waiting to do volunteer work for triage. My brothers and sister had heard from both of us, but didn't really believe we were safe. Meanwhile, my father wanted to help all the people coming in.

There weren't that many, I told him. His kids need him. Be a father. The EMT's must've hated me, but I had to get him home. He has a 3-year-old daughter who didn't know if her daddy was alive. You should've seen the way her eyes lit up when we came in the door.

At some point, I had returned home, packed up clothes, some minor electronics, and my skates. Very little else. I left behind:

Lego sets galore.
The entire home network.
All my consoles, save the Game Boy Advance.
Tivo, DVD player, TV, etc.
6 years worth of Dark Horizons notes.
My sense of security.

But now, I've seen them come down. WT 5 was weakened. One Liberty Plaza is at risk of collapsing.

I can't go home.
I can't go home.
I can't go home.

And all I'm hearing is the faint sound of CBS news (the only ones who didn't broadcast from WTC), the sound of a passenger jet dropping through the sky into an explosion that has changed me forever, and Don McLean's "American Pie" in my head.

I wish this were all like the fiction that I watch and read.

Maybe we'll send someone back in time seven days to stop this all from having occurred.
Maybe we'll rebuild downtown like Tokyo-3.
Maybe I'm more than clairvoyant, and can actually change the past.
Maybe I'll wake up, realizing that I'm the kind of person who thinks that Krissy would cry, David Gold would worry about even after an LJ post, and Nat's grammy would be in danger. The person who sees Max as someone who doesn't freak out when there's a cloud of rubble 3 blocks from his home. The kind of person who doesn't think Rob would update his LJ at all. One of the few people morbid enough to dream of two planes ramming into the Towers, and seeing it in my head at multiple angles.

And that none of this ever happened.

Instead, I curse the fact that I left this country, the fact that I don't have perfect vision, the fact that I'm mildly asthmatic. I can't give blood because I was in Germany. I can't fly a plane in the service of my country because I'd need glasses or contacts to read the altimeter. And I can't even join the Armed Forces without worrying about being unable to breathe.

So I stopped thinking about it. I'm reading webcomics, unrelated Slashdot posts, and just drifting about lazily from room to room. I'm not going to work tomorrow, since I don't have to.

This is so 1995 of me. I stopped feeling this way ages ago. I got better. I got happy. And within 18 minutes, they took that from me. Within 2 hours, they made sure it wouldn't come back anytime soon.

Guys, we need to get together. I'd say my place, but it's just too close to it all, even if it was accessible. We just need to get together, say hello, and know for certain that each and every one of us is alive. I'm alive, but I doubt I'm well.

God bless each and every one of you.