When the Walls Fell Down
It happened in a moment. It was summer, but I must have dreamed it. My entire life was laid out before me, and then I was ambushed and found out that what I knew, I did not know.
I was good, but then I found out that I was not. Even worse, I had not been good for a long time, and now I knew.
It is always like that absolute shift in reality that the entire world had on 9/11. For seventeen minutes that morning, we all thought a terrible accident had happened. Then at 9:03 am, Flight 175 hit the south tower and then we knew that everything we knew was wrong.
As we watch video footage, we feel an incredible desire to rewrite the events of that September morning or whenever we watch the Challenger lift off on January 28, 1986. The loss cannot be counted, and the ripple that follows lifts the ties, tracks, and spikes right out of the ground and takes them elsewhere.
Sometimes, I looked down the corridor and I knew that if I walked down the hallway, the building would collapse upon me. Sometimes I did that, and sometimes I did not.
In the times in which I felt there was no warning, I looked back and could see that there were always signs and warnings along the way. Lying to oneself can come so easily.
It was a bitter cold Saturday afternoon in January of 1978. We sat in the warmth of Torrington’s Warner Theatre. Charlene and I had just settled into the movie, Saturday Night Fever. Suddenly, something I had never seen happen before, they turned down the movie and paged her. Ninety seconds later, everything was different. It will always be engraved in me. Eternally, she is standing in the aisle, crying and I hear her voice still. Twenty minutes later, we were sitting in a cigarette-smoke-filled kitchen, stuck.
When the walls fell down, sometimes we did things. Sometimes we did not do things. The gambler knows when to hold and when to fold. He is not always right and the more he is successful you can be sure it came with so much loss.
When the walls fell down I learned, I cried, and I was angry. When the walls fell down I had to build something from ruins always feeling the pain of not having built what I could have before the collapse.
When the walls fell down I wanted to fall down too. A world-saving mission had just failed, and now the planet was knocked out of its orbit and was hurtling into outer space to die a cold and dark death. I wanted to find a mountaintop somewhere to just watch it all fade away.
But there was something inside of me that said no. There was something that made me get up and continue. I hated it, and it made me furious, but it drove me to my feet and I clenched my fists and I screamed. I stood up with the ruins at my feet, knowing now what really happened, knowing I was about to build from whatever was left. Would it be better, I don’t know. I just know that it would be fortified with the walls that fell down and somehow, this would add strength.