5 years

Is anyone else surprised that it's a whole 5 years since 9/11?

I can't believe it myself. Kind of for selfish reasons. It's just weird now how fast time passes. A whole 5 years seems like yesterday. And like everyone keeps saying, it's one of those moments that everyone remembers where they were or what they were doing - like Elvis dying (my friend remembers his mother having to pull the car over because she was crying so hard) or the Kennedy assassination.

I was just starting my writing college course in Calgary and sleeping rough at a friend's house while i looked for an apartment. She called me from work and told me to turn the television on right away. So i did, and it was about 9 am so I saw it all unfold on television like one of those disaster movies. And when I got to college, the foyers were all filled with televisions and 24 hour news feeds. There were bomb threats and rumours that Calgary was in danger because of the oil headquarters.

I was waiting for my then boyfriend to hitchhike/sneak across the border to visit me and i had no idea where he was. (He was that type that could be anywhere.) So maybe he was in New York. They announced that the borders were basically closed. So that was it. There was no way he was getting across. But then a couple of days later he called to say that he'd kayaked across the border the night before.

And they said that all air transport was grounded indefinitely. But that night we were sitting on my friend's back porch drinking wine and we heard a plane fly over. Was it the bin Ladens being evacuated to Saudi Arabia?

So much shit has happened in the last 5 years. But at the same time, nothing really has. Just a series of meaningless suicide bombings and random wars that have accomplished nothing but take up all the news. The only thing that makes it real and pertinent to you is the longer queues at the airports, the crazy new passport regulations, threats of UK id cards. The other stuff is real too, but bizarre because it's like violent video games or movies. They've lost the power to shock.