And then the skies were empty.

I was sleeping when the phone rang. Annoyed at the call I answered as such
" What?"
It was my husband.
" turn on the t.v. "
" why am I turning on the t.v"
" Just do it," So I did. the tower shown in the summer blue sky as smoke poured out.  A plane had hit the tower. The pilot was probably drunk, we joked, how could he not see a building that tall. Wait, there's another... I had no words. We sat in stunned silence as we watched the second tower collide with the buildings, buildings that only a year before had marked for us our arrival on the East coast.  Was there some crazed person in charge at the air traffic control office that day. We still didn't know. Then the report came in about the plane hitting the pentagon. This was an attack. Someone was flying plans into things ON PURPOSE!
" Come home, now"
But he wouldn't, and I had to work. It was all the way in New York, he said, nothings going to happen here.
So I dressed, in black for the loss of life happening so far away about which I could do nothing BUT dress in black, my John Lennon tshirt preaching peace.
                 I was working at a head shop at the time and when I got there there was a line. Everyone wanted whip-its. If you're not keen on drug lingo, whip-its are tiny nitrice oxide charges that, when inhaled from a balloon, cause changes in your visual and physical perception. Apparently someone had discovered that if you did nitrice and watched the images they were showing, and would seemingly never stop showing, you could watch the glass roll like water. I sold over 30 boxes of them that day, and everyone brought me closer and closer to the brink. And then they fell. 3000 miles away people were dying and we stood; my co-worker, the staff from the bar next door, and a handful of customers, and we watched. The firefighters, doing their shopping across the street, were surrounded by other customers in the parking lot. We got word they were trying to get information out of them about what was really going on, but it was a good day and a half before any credible information came out, and not a bit of it was good news.
In those hours, between waking and finally getting home, all I wanted was my husband to be with me, to know that no matter what madness was going on in the world, I had him. And then I would think of the wives whose husbands worked THERE, the wives who would not come home that night, the mothers and fathers who were gone.
                  It wasn't until that night that the initial shock wore off and I could see that those bits of building falling were actually people, that those grey shapes moving away from the building were not part of the smoke, but yet more people running for their lives.
I had friends in the city, and all were safe. Ashley had had the day off after switching with a friend and so she wasn't at the Starbucks down the street from the towers that day, but watching at home like the rest of us. Blake had had the sense to leave work early after the first plane hit, leaving his 103 floor office in the second tower and finding himself half way home when he watched the second plane make its approach.
In the time that followed everyone was afraid. My mother in law urged us not to go to Disneyland because they might do something there, not to fly the following april as even the armed guards that lined the airport halls might not save us. But my husband and I agreed on this; We would not be afraid. They had taken that day to scare the world, to fill us with terror and while there will always be a great weight in my heart for those I watched die that day, they will not win. I had many choice words on the sudden burst of pseudo patriotism, on the way the Administration was using the loss of life to fuel their agenda, and the strange way the buildings fell, but on this day I think only of those who are not here, and those whose hearts are hallow in their absence.
Be you Democrat, Republican, or disenfranchised third party; You are an American, and that day we were as one. Let us grab hold of that feeling, that knowledge that we are all brothers and sister and cousins and never forget that lesson. Let their terror fill us with love and understanding for each other. Let us have peace.