White ribbons

I always mean to write about where I was when the planes hit the towers(bed). Or when the reports were coming in about the Pentagon (unloading hay). Or when the towers fells (getting gas, racing home). Or finally getting word from my flight-attendant-in-training mom (stuck in Tennessee). Yet I never do. I talk about it sometimes, though, especially on the anniversary.

In comparison, my personal narrative probably wouldn't hold a candle to many other "Where Were You" essays about that day, but it remains one of the most vividly surreal moments of my life. I was 19, watching what at the time I was sure would be the beginning of the end of everything.

I remember news channels heartlessly splicing footage of the fall, of terrified, powdered faces streaked with muddy tears, of rescuers overcome with exhaustion and grief. Endlessly replayed in 15 minute segments, endlessly rewatched.

I remember the impossibly long lines the next day at the blood drive on campus. The paranoia that this was only the first wave. I remember smoking outside of class a handful of classmates, how every head jerked up and scanned warily at the sound of a low-flying airplane flying overhead, each of us silently contemplating the odds of an attack on a small town.

Most of all I remember the white ribbons. In the days immediately following, before anyone could start cranking out American flags en masse and in every conceivable size and shape, before the gaudy back glass stickers and hostile car magnets, before the prophesy conspiracy theories and the clever acronyms, there were the white ribbons. They were soon replaced by more marketable mementos, but for a while it was one of the straws at which we grasped. Seeing a white ribbon on a jacket or a book bag was an anchor of sorts, a reminder that as terrible as shit could get (and there really seemed to be no high-water mark then), we still had one another.