Fiat Lux

I have some notes sitting around for a blog entry I was planning on posting on March 11, three and a half years after 9/11, but today's news is upsetting enough that I'll blog about the topic now instead.

Here's the notes I'd started on:

Sitting in a room in the library on campus, looking out a glass window at the hills of San Francisco, and listening to some Sara McLaughlin sharply brought to mind a moment from the last vacation I took before 9/11; a few days at a ritzy spa in Arizona with my mother & sister. The moment I am thinking of was towards the end of the trip. I had had a massage and was sitting in the quiet room of the spa, enjoying some tea and looking out another glass wall at a storm coming in over the mountains. I was relaxed, and at peace. And I'm feeling pretty good today, but it occurred to me as I sit here that in a very real way, I have never felt that good ever since 9/11. With three and a half years passed since that terrible day, I am starting to wonder if I ever will feel the same way again.

I'm not as bad as I was the first few months afterwards. The horror, the pain, the feeling that my world was ripped out by the roots -- they do not grip me the way they did. I've had to work to get to that point. As with other subjects that I know will depress and upset me, I go out of my way to not awaken the pain. It's a reasonably successful technique - whole days can go by without me thinking of that morning. And then I do, and the pain and fear and sorrow come back.

I'm unsure whether trying not to think about things that upset me is the best possible coping tactic, frankly. But it does get me through the days and allows me to function as a reasonably normal person, most of the time.

Today was one of those days when my coping skills failed me. The thought that maybe there really was enough information out there, that there was enough to warn people; that maybe, just maybe, this madness could have been averted makes me feel like hell.