September 20, 2001: and I won't come out for days and days
And I finally found that first mail I sent out, the evening of the day that everything terrible happened all at once:
Date: Tue, 11 Sep 2001 18:05:26 -0700 (PDT)
From: Kris Millering
Subject: {new zero} the worst day ever.
He came in when I was eating breakfast to tell me that someone had blown up the world trade center. I thuoght he was pulling my leg. my grandfather's like that.
then I turned on the tv.
The cloud of this has been hanging low over my head. the enormity of it is incomprehensible. and here I am in hostile territory, without anyone in a hundred miles to give me a supportive hug.
my grandfather keeps introducing me as his new girlfriend. this was fine the first four or five times, but it's now seriously creeping me out. And he introduces me to everyone--we stopped at at least three houses of people who are his friends today, he's made sure to introduce me to all the nurses at the nursing home, and pretty much to everyone on the street he's showing me off and it's making me sick. just sick. I began at about noon to have the feeling that I needed to start chewing at my leg in order to get free.
I am never doing this again. ever.
My loved ones on the east coast are safe, and tomorrow I'll be in Iowa, on friendly ground. life will be better tomorrow.
"Where were you at the start of world War Three?"
"Trapped in Pine Island, MN, attempting to stay sane."
No entry. I have something written, but I don't have the energy tonight to upload it. I'm tired, and sick at heart.
--Kris. Shellshocked.
counting the wrecks
the first disaster
was a war in a humid place
that ended right before I was born.
in the womb, I idly kicked, waiting
and unconcerned about young men with guns.
the second disaster
was a giant rocket
that exploded in midair.
we all thought she was joking when she told us
it just blew up
there was a teacher on the rocket
and teachers were exempt from harm
or death.
later, when I saw the pictures,
I believed
and there was a small hole torn in the sky
where a rocket should have been
and where my ability to be whole must have lain.
the third disaster
happened to me
1989--I was 15--
and the earth roared and swallowed the sky.
17 seconds later
I was still alone in a world gone silent.
Later that night, we watched a flickering portable TV
plugged into a neighbor's pickup
the images of the tipped houses
and the abruptly flattened freeway
burned in me as we retreated
to dark houses, bereft of current.
The aftershocks rocked us for weeks.
the fourth disaster
was a war in a dry place
wearing my little yellow ribbons.
the fifth disaster
was four planes fully fueled
six thousand voices silenced
and an emptiness in the sky so large
I almost fell upwards, through it.
it was an emptiness so vast
so vast and so cluttered--
I am so tired of the word rubble
and will never use it again.
I drove home through that emptiness.
two thousand miles through land
and silence flickering with the images
of what happened--flickering with images
that pulled us into the wreck
into a burning city that taught us nothing but anger.
And a terrible, vast grief.
We were too far away, all of us, but even then still too close.
Words are a poor bandage for those images
and the aftershocks are still coming.
Flowing onward, our politics wash us
away, to other distant shores
to other drums, beating on other mountains
to the sixth disaster, waiting, watching.
one final note:
I wondered, today, why the 97, the little bus I ride down to where i work sometimes from the Bon, now says Belltown instead of...
...World Trade Center Express.
oh.
