Crying Room

I  listen to the classical music station in my office and so it is playing on the morning of 9/11, which is how I find out about the towers and tell my colleagues, the other teachers at my school.  My room is on the fourth floor facing the city. When I look out of the window I see a thick black ribbon in the sky billowing sideways, blowing east from the city toward Brooklyn.

 I tell someone I have to get my sons. My five year-old just started kindergarten and my toddler was at daycare.  But I walk in the opposite direction from my car,  towards the ferry, where there is a clear view of the city across the harbor. The iconic view of lower Manhattan that's on postcards.  I grew up with that view, taking the Staten Island Ferry toward it my whole life.

My pace and gait  up the steep hill and down the block toward the water is jerky and stilted, like a zombie.  On the way to the ferry is the Brighton Heights Reformed Church.  I have never been in there, but I have admired its tall white spire every day from my office window and I am pulled in toward the sanctuary by my need to sit quietly in the last moments of the old world.

The church is locked but the door isn't closed shut all the way and I walk in, sounding the security alarm.  The alarm is blaring but I don't have any reaction to it. Except  that maybe I'm grateful that I can't hear my own thoughts. I am completely alone.  I  see a door to a small room and know it is where I need to be so I walk toward it.  It is a little room in the back of the church, a room for parents to take their children during church when they get upset so they won't disturb service. The sign on the door says, "Crying Room."

I open the door and fold myself into a tiny chair.  I hug my knees to my chest in that little room built to comfort little ones who are inconsolable and with the sounds of deafening alarms going on all around me I sob and sob as the souls of my friends and neighbors are released into that black ribbon.