I was sleeping in a room full of bunk beds when a guy I talk trash about from time to time peeked through the white sheet that separated my lower bunk from the other bunkers. He had glasses on, and his face was thinner than I remembered.
"I heard you're leaving tomorrow," he said. "You know I love you, right?"
I hadn't known that.
I was in the back of a kitchen trying to convince Kristin to come with me. But she couldn't. Something was going on with my plane ticket. I couldn't figure out what time my plane left. But I walked into the city alone. There were people on the streets, a vibe of unease.
People were turned in my direction; they were looking behind me with a look of dismay and sadness.
I turned as well and was astonished to see one of the twin towers, falling, crumbling.
"Not again," I thought. I knew it was terrorists. They were angry because of an embargo. I was crushed. Deeply saddened at all those lives that had just been folded into the earth right in front of me. And I was then concerned for my own safety. Looking at downtown Little Rock before me, the sky was a dark gray. And then our buildings began to crumble. Those in front of me. Would the capital fall too? I was standing right in front of it. I was in panic mode. Survival panic. The columns began to crumble. There was so much noise I could hear nothing. Everything was happening in slow motion. I saw what a girl I knew from high school was doing and I imitated her, running from underneath the capital towards the street. I ran and it felt like I was running in the ocean or on the moon. Through gravity.
I kicked off of one of the columns to gain momentum.
Things were collapsing, the closing of a pop up book, our world.
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