2001-09-12 10:45 a.m. I woke before my alarm this morning. Not surprising, really. I slept in fits throught the night, sliding between awake and asleep more often than I would have liked. Lying there in the darkness of my room, I couldn't understand where the feeling of unease I was awaking with came from. Then it hit me. The WTC. The Pentagon. This is my home. And it is not safe anymore. Work let me go at 11 yesterday. When I left, we didn't know if the attacks were over or if they had just begun. I had heard that Camp David had been hit, that Fort Detrick was on high alert. Both are less than twenty minutes from my house. As I drove west on I-70, I saw Air Force fighter jets patrolling the skies above Frederick county. This is my home. Camp David wasn't hit, nor was Detrick. Stories from friends and friends of friends started rolling in. The highschool friend of one of my college friends has a brother that worked on the 110th floor of tower two. No one has heard from him. Pat, a guy I partied with at Loyola, was seen on teevee hauling ass down the street as the WTC came tumbling down. Hauling ass to save his life. This is my home. We are, as a country, still in a state of extreme shock. We are sad. We are angry. But most of all, we are scared. We were blessedly naive, and somehow I don't think we can ever afford to be naive again. I've been reading alot of overseas d*land diaries, reading alot of message boards with posts from Brits and Aussies and Germans. And overall, the message has been: You pain is our pain. I don't know if anyone outside the States reads this, but if they do, I want to say Thank You. We know your hearts and prayers are with us and it means more than you can ever know. Tony Blair said it very well yesterday when he talked of the attacks as not just attacks in America, but on Freedom and Democracy everywhere. And he's right. When it comes down to it, there is no America. There is no Great Britain, no Germany, No Australia. There is one World, and we are all sisters and brothers. We are al in this together. The fact that, in our moment of greatest dispair, we are reminded of this by our foreign cousins gives me boundless hope for us as a race. There are questions to be answered. There is music to be faced. There is justice to be served. There is healing to be done. But if we realize that dispite our losses, we still have eachother, well then, somehow we will survive. downtown----uptown leave me a note, fool!

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