I remember on 9/11, I went to vote. My husband drove me before work to the basement in an apartment building where the assembly of retired women gave me instructions and offered me donuts. Moose was going to be late as usual and we argued in McDonalds while having breakfast afterwards. I don't remember now what it was about. He dropped me off at home and just as I was about to get out of the van, the radio said that a plane had crashed into the WTC. I thought nothing of it really, a testament to how jaded I had become to human suffering. I thought maybe it was pilot error, or something wrong with the plane, but I didn't really give it a second thought. We parted. He went to work and I went upstairs to my apartment and turned on the computer. At that point I wasn't so much of a television junkie. I rarely watched t.v. during the day. Television watching was my post-9/11 reality, for weeks afterwards as soon as I woke up I would check the news to see if I had missed anything, to see what other horrible atrocities were happening in the world.

Instead I checked my e-mail and began doing my homework when my friend logged onto AIM and told me to turn on the tv. A plane flew into the WTC. Yeah I heard. Sad. Now a Second plane collided. I thought she was kidding. Maybe the tower was giving them wrong directions, I thought. I realize now I lacked any knowledge of aviation but hijacking never occurred to me. Maybe because this was America and I lived, still at that point, inside the bubble that these kinds of things didn't happen here.

I turned on the television and listened to the reporters remaining calm, trying to do their job without causing a panic. Honestly, it was all a blur. I tried to page my husband, at least a million times. He worked at the UN and I was scared because planes were falling out of the sky. In the deepest parts of my brain I was imagining the UN with planes sticking out of the sides and I was terrified. Then the pentagon was hit. My mom called and asked if I had heard from my husband. I told her I was scared. He wasn't responding to his pages. I went to the windowsill in the kitchen and smoked the cigarette butts my mother had left. I had asthma but I didn't care. I needed something. I was eating myself alive inside. I prayed selfish prayers to bring my husband home. I tried to bargain with God. I beat myself up for arguing with him all the time. Why couldn't I just be nice?

When the towers fell, I was stunned. Waves of anxiety passed over me, rippling under my skin. It wasn't seeing the towers that affected me as much as hearing the reporter screaming. It was too much for her and she had to break, understandably, but her screams meant this was really happening. I was kneeling by the window in the kitchen, crying, searching for a butt with at least a puff left in it when I heard keys in the front door. My husband walked in and called for me and I ran into his arms like they did in the old movies when the men came home from war. Apparently his bus had come out of the tunnel in Manhattan just as the tower fell and the bus driver turned around immediately, without instruction, and headed back to Queens. Its a good thing he did too, or else my husband would have been amongst the thousands hoofing it over the bridge back into Queens.

The city was on lockdown. There was nowhere to go even if we wanted to run, and I did. I wanted to pack my cats up so bad and drive to Florida, fuck New York. I would have even gone to Idaho. There was military and police everywhere for weeks and seeing them made me feel like 'this is not over.' We were at war, but with who? The UN was never hit, but there were a few bomb threats and evacuations that were never publicized. My husband tried to explain to me that the UN would never have been a target but it never reached me. The whole city was a target and there are still times when I go over a bridge or in a tunnel that I get scared that there might be a truck with a bomb next to me. Somehow those wounds I think will never heal. They are still there, all scabby, waiting to bleed again.

I take the fear and pain I felt and I multiply it by 9 Billion. That is what the actual friends and family of the victims felt. Or the people on the planes that realized they were going to die and made final calls to their loved ones. if the president knew, if there was misconduct, then we have a right to impeach this man, to make him go before a court, to punish him. No one is expendable in this country. Apparently, there was misconduct. To what extent we don't know. But here is a good start at gathering information and making the Bush administration accountable for their actions.

An Interesting Day: Bush's Movements and Actions on 9/11

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