And it Will Feel Like Truth — Day 2

By the end of the week, I’m done for — and so is the Linebacker. By August, we’re talking every day. By November, we’re exclusive. By Christmas, I know I’m in love. He gives me a promise ring and I don’t care about anything other than what it means to be his girl. I am entangled. He is my air.

By the time we find ourselves back at the camp a year later, people wonder about the real ring — engagement. His high school friends keep dropping like flies and getting engaged, and we are the coupled duo everyone expects to last. We spend the week finding yet another unoccupied cabin and resting against each other as we daydream about what our like will look like ten years from now.

He would be the football coach.

I would be the English teacher.

We’ll have our small house with the picketed fence out in front, our kids laughing and tripping over each other.

Our kids.

We talk about them like you do a story, and I’m not sure about him, but even now those moments still don’t feel concrete. Nothing has changed. I think of myself as a mother and something obscures any vision possible. It just doesn’t feel true… I can see myself as a teacher. I can see myself at football games and within the community. But kids? I say nothing about my doubts and assume that certainty will come with time. I’m well on my way to the American Dream: husband, kids, white picket fence….

Knowing the seriousness of our relationship, I transfer to a college about an hour away from his home town. The year before, fresh off of his Linebacker of the Year award for his district, he suffered a massive concussion that took him out of the game for good. As devastating as that was, he’s not letting it slow him down. He enrolls in the junior college and plans on transferring to University of Oklahoma his sophomore year. We have everything planned.

Everything is perfect.

And then everything falls apart.

My first memory centers around one morning in September.

I have my first test that day. Hoping to get some time in for studying, I go to the cafeteria for breakfast and to meet a friend. When I walk into the building, a group gathers around the television downstairs. I think it’s weird, but not worthy of pause. I focus again on my notes.

But then I notice there isn’t a student worker waiting to swipe my card at the top of the stairs.

And then I notice the cafeteria is eerily quiet.

I feel a thrumming in my ears, that feeling you get when your intuition begs for you to pay attention. Something sour settles in my gut and my eyes rests on a group of about twenty professors standing in front of the television in the corner, their gaze hypnotic.

Finally, I get close enough to read the print on the bottom of the screen: PLANE CRASHES INTO WORLD TRADE CENTER. I don’t know what was happening, but I know it’s something. I skip out on breakfast and grab a banana as I rush out the door.

I remember the student talking to his parents on the payphone downstairs, his tears visible from across the room. I remember the way my hands shook as I try to get my card to cooperate with the lock outside my dorm. I remember opening my door and turning on my television just as the second plane crashes into the buildings.

And I remember calling my boyfriend, needing to hear his voice — needing the safety of him and us and my world to turn right again.

“Hello?” He answers the phone, groggy from sleep.

“Hey, babe. I’m sorry I’m calling so early—”

“What? Elora. Why are you—I’m sleeping.” His voice holds something foreign — a coldness.

“I know. I’m sorry. Just…just turn on the television.”

“You called me to turn on the fucking television?”

I’m crying by then, my entire world upended in a single moment and marked by these towers now threatening to fall.

Don’t fall. Please don’t fall, I beg the screen, wrapping my fingers and hope around the phone chord.

“Please.” I whisper. “Just turn it on. Something’s happened.”

I can hear the echo of the network on his end and the quick inhale of breath.

He knows.

And yet, somehow, this doesn’t make anything better.

Thirty minutes later, as I walk down the hallway toward my next class, I peek into a friend’s room as she watches the footage and we gasp in unison as the building give way to ash and rubble. I stand there, frozen, unable to form any thought. Unknown to me, those towers had become metaphorical. I can’t help it. There’s no way to categorize the horror, the way the faces of those running the streets of New York City would imprint themselves in my memory. I have to make it work for my psyche — and still nothing makes sense because it doesn’t work. The buildings collapse. People jump from windows to their death. The Falling Man is memorialized.

And my life turns topsy-turvy.

I go to work that night while everyone on campus hosts a prayer vigil in the living room of our dorm. I try to make sandwiches and conversation with those who find themselves out and about on such a dark day, but it’s impossible — both for them and for me. No one wants to talk. For a few days, everything is a holy hush, the pause before a breath.

My best friend at the time, the one who wrapped her arms around me back at camp and knew I was in trouble before I could even articulate it, picks me up that weekend to go home. We drive Highway 69 talking about life and love and new beginnings, and hold our breath when we see a plane in the sky.

“Is it falling?” I ask.

The clouded vespers it leaves behind make a noticeable line toward the horizon.

She slows the truck and pulls to the side of the road and we sit there, staring at the piece of metal against the cobalt blue, until it rights itself and points its nose to the heavens.

I close my eyes and let myself collapse against the leather seat behind me. She shifts her truck in gear and eases back onto the road.

It takes years for my world to feel as if it isn’t in decline — isn’t collapsing — isn’t headed for certain disaster.