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September 11, 2003

So it was two years ago today that it all went down.

I was miserable in my office as usual that morning, and when Miss Thing the Redhead Who Was Always Joking said she was looking online to see the World Trade Center on fire, I didn't believe her.

Of course, none of us believed it at first.

But it happened anyway.

I wish I had something profound to say about it, but I just don't. It renders me speechless. A big empty hole in the sky.

The company I was working for at the time, who sent hundreds of thousands of people—mostly high school students—abroad, their first concern was whether there were any EF travellers on the planes that went down.

After they determined that there weren't any, their next concern was to try to prevent the massive numbers of cancellations that immediately started coming in. They asked all these shell-shocked recent college-grad sales kids, some of whom had family in Manhattan, to stay on and answer the phones.

It was my job to remove all the pictures of the Twin Towers from the website. As if the very image of them would be somehow offensive.

I was scheduled to depart for Rome on September 18, 2001. I was tagging along on one of the group tours we sold. This was one of the perks of working there—one I never did get to experience, because that trip was cancelled. I was so burned out, I took the two weeks off anyway, went on a harbor cruise or two with Quick.

When I came back, half my team was missing.

A year later, they found an excuse to lay me off under some very shady circumstances. I'm still in litigation against them.

But none of that matters really, compared to the lives lost that day in New York. Or the lives lost halfway across the globe in other countries we'd hardly even thought about before that day.

I'd like to say that we had the chance to change things, to end the cycle of violence, but I'm not sure that's true. I think I've become more cynical than that. After all, most people these days go around saying "President Bush" with a straight face, and act like the election debacle of 2000 never happened. So what's a few invasions? Maybe it'll stimulate the economy a little bit.

Feh. I think I'd like to go home and bury my head under the covers now. Kali, I hope you're happy with your dance on our poor little earth.