Overheard

“They blew up the Millennium.”

An odd comment to hear exactly one month after that in fact occurred. This woman was talking about what happened more recently: they have had to destruct a hotel (new. sleek, sophisticated) that stood across the street from the World Trade Center.

And my stomach flips over and my heart sinks a bit deeper and I hover on the verge of raging sorrow …

The landscape in which I live is not beautiful, it has been not natural for centuries. This is an old city in a young country, and so much of what passes for beauty here has been efficiency or sophistication or speed. But where those massive sleek towers stood indomitable over our funky quirky skyline; where we browsed for long luxurious hours through books and clothes and stationery; where we grabbed a cup of bottle of bite of something on our mad dashes to somewhere else; now there is nothing but a landscape so massively gashed, so reverberatingly wounded that I cannot bring my eyes to look in that direction. My mind blocks out the idea of it; I stay on my small patch so close but far enough, thank you, far enough to breathe most of the time. The wind shifting remains threatening.

We still have haunted eyes. It is not uncommon to look into a face and see stark pain staring back.

It has been one month since a wound was dealt that may need all of eternity to heal.