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ornithopter: In The Wake Of Sept. 11th... |
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Man, I hate that phrase, don't you?
Anyhoo, I felt I had nothing new to add to any musings on 9/11, so I refrained from posting yesterday. That being said, you all got me thinking. I knew someone who was on one of the planes that hit the WTC. Not well at all, mind you, she was someone I worked with at a consulting firm and I knew her more by name than by sight as she was usually on the road. On the one or two occasions that I did meet her, she struck me as an annoying go-getter. Nevertheless, after hearing about what happened to her, I ended up immediately identifying with her. She was something like 7 months pregnant and on the plane with her husband. I pictured them holding hands and closing their eyes tightly as the plane plowed into the tower at 500mph. This always led me to the closest thing I've had so far to a brush with death:
It was the day before my 25th birthday and I was picking my then boyfriend up from his job working at a comic book warehouse. I walked up the stairs to the main room of the warehouse and walked in on a scene that for some reason did not immediately strike me as menacing. A man in a ski mask holding a pistol was leaning over Tom, my ex, who was tied up and gagged with duct tape and lying on his stomach on the floor next to a couple of other employees who were in the same position. For some reason, my first thought at this point was, "Oh, this is some sort of dorky role playing game," you know, what with all the comic geeks around and all. As I was thinking this, I could see Tom trying to catch my eye. The guy hadn't heard me come in and he was trying to signal to me to get out of there, but I was too confused to pick up on that. The guy must have seen Tom looking at me and he turned around and pointed the gun at me and told me to go lie down on my stomach with the others. As I walked over and laid down next to Tom, I had visions of the recurring nightmares that I had on a regular basis where I was in just this position as masked men sprayed the floor with machine gun fire. At this point, I was sure that I was going to die, but for some reason, I wasn't scared. I was actually relieved that if Tom was going to die, at least I was going to die with him. I felt very calm as the masked guy taped up my hands. I had forgotten that I still had my car keys in my hand, but I was pretty sure we were not going to be killed when he took them from my hand and said to me, "I'm going to put your keys on this box over here." Why would I need to know that if I was going to be killed? Just then, another guy came out of the office, holding a machine gun in one hand, and Tom's boss in the other, and tripped over a display case. I held my breath waiting for the gun to go off. It didn't. They were on their way out. They couldn't find any of the $10,000 or so dollars that had just been taken in that day because the manager's desk was so messy they couldn't find anything and he had lied and told them that all the money was in checks. Not a good idea to lie about that stuff to a guy pointing a machine gun into your back, but whatever.
So, anyway, the cops eventually showed up after having been called by one of the other employees who was hiding under her desk the whole time. Eventually, because they ended up going to the wrong address and missing the bad guys altogether. Fine by me, as I had no interest in being a hostage.
So, what was my point? I don't know. My story had a happy ending in the short term, but despite my feelings, Tom and I broke up (my idea,) and now we don't even speak. Things never really have a happy ending, do they, because things never really end, even after you've died, tragically or not. Maybe the moral is that it's better to go out happy and quick than slowly and sad. Maybe it's the opposite. I don't know, life confuses the bejesus out of me.
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