There’s been a disturbing cross-effect of sadness that’s taken up residence in these morbid pockets of my mind, due to the London bombings and reading The Time Traveler’s Wife. It’s not that I’m morose all the time or even part of the time but merely some of the time, which for me is enough because generally, I might be one of the least morose people you’ve never met. But you can’t help but think of death and loss and sadness when those two things are happening simultaneously even if they have otherwise absolutely nothing to do with one another.
September 11th and the twin tower collapse is long enough ago that when I’m not being specifically asked (in a curious, prod-the-animals-in-the-zoo sort of way) by non New Yorkers to recount that day, my only reference to it is the practical aspects of finding my way home and my loved ones again, should something similar ever happen in the city again. Stuart and I have our meet points and a landline because if we’re both wandering the city after a disaster, we need to get back to each other safely and with the least amount of personal panic possible. The disaster area downtown is just that – a disaster area downtown. Two discreet and once-majestic buildings fell to the ground, atrociously, horrifyingly, on one day in September.
My reaction to the London bombing has been different because I live in a city with a subway system. And a subway system is different than a building because a subway system is everywhere at once, and anyone I know could be on any given train at any given time. And I don’t know where they are. I know what buildings they work in, and that mental checklist in a time of crisis would go quickly. But to imagine the horror of knowing my friends, my loved ones, are underground, and not knowing where, and not knowing where they are in relation to a crisis – it’s stilted my mind. I cannot think myself logically around that fear.
Which is difficult for me. When I was a small kid living in Africa, I never consciously knew that there were things to worry about. As in, we didn’t ride around the city in fear of our whiteness, of our stand-out-ishness. There were stories, there were hijackings, there were safety measures. But I was never afraid of these things on a daily basis. And yet, when I felt unsafe at night, when I couldn’t sleep, I would play the robber game. I would play this game in my head where I was a thief, a ne’er-do-well, and I was trying to get into our house. I would watch my fictitious robber climb over walls, aha! Get stopped by the guard. I would watch him break a kitchen window, aha! An alarm would sound. I would even watch the crafty bugger get into the house unnoticed somehow but oh, yes, we had a full-coverage metal gate at the top of the stairs to protect the sleeping inhabitants from harm. This would, implausibly, soothe me. It would remind me that we’d done all we could, as a family, to safeguard ourselves.
I’ve been finding myself playing this game for a week, with the subways. Where am I? What time do I pass through what stations? What time (more importantly to me as it always is with love) is Stuart on the W? What time is he on the 4/5? When, presuming the unthinkable (now readily thinkable) happened, would I have to launch into a full scale freak out? Could I somehow talk myself through disaster and avoid freaking out?
Therein lies the problem. None of these safety measures are mine. Many of them have proven fruitless. For everthing England went through in the 1980′s, for every death they’ve tried to prevent, over fifty still happened. That’s fifty people, let’s say there are at least twenty people that love each of those fifty people to the point of heinous grief at their loss, and now, look: that’s one thousand immediately grieving, stricken, robbed people. And no nighttime games they might have played to assuage their greatest fears helped when their loved ones were simply on the wrong train at the wrong time in a system with no way to prevent being on that wrong train at that wrong time.
If I stay up at night thinking about the morbidity of my own helplessness, there isn’t a headgame I can play to ease it. There isn’t anything I can do. It’s just scary. I’ll end this here and I won’t give you any answers and surely, you won’t have any for me, and we don’t have any for the people who have been robbed, bereft, heartbroken.
So it’s not so much a dilemma as it is a horrible fact.

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