September 11

Where were you? Where were you eight years ago when plumes like hands sent skyward a warning beacon, a misery unfettered, a poison mistaken for a draught. What were you doing, what images are imprinted upon your neurons, what emotions upon your myocytes? I imagine the electrical impulses cascading from sulcus to gyrus, scaling cliffs of the brain and rappelling down, telegraphs marching out shock and grief. I remember that day. I had not heard until I got to school. Fingers numb, I thought it was the wind. Passing by the windows of a coordinated science classroom, the silhouette of Mr Knight held me. Standing under the TV, his head crooked up at the screen, as if hung by murder. What a piece of work is man! How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty. If only we had known, if only we had read the cards or thrown the dice or followed the lifeline, divination by desperation, thaumaturgy in retrospect. If only, if only. Where would you have been if you had known? If by premonition or askance, you suspected such miscarriage, what would you have chosen? I don't know where I'd want to be. Perhaps I'd take some great sacrifice and stand another's place or be at the front, clearing rubble. But perhaps I'd rather the sanctuary of home or perhaps I'd still choose to be where I was, outside Mr Knight's classroom, breath steaming the window, time paused for no man. This indecisiveness, this parity of possibility, the lack of commitment to the hypothetical - that is why I sometimes leave free will behind. Sometimes, I find it easier to float current-rushed rather than paddle. Sometimes, I pick fruit off the ground rather than climb the decision tree. But in annual renewal, I remind myself that passive routes, though they may seem better lit, are hardly express and admirable, in action hardly an angel, in apprehension hardly a God. We must act on any injustice, lest a witness become carrion. No whisper is left unheard. 09.11.09.