Time Drifters

Any beginning has its pluses. Everyone at school had the giddy excitement of seeing each other again, as though we’d all been apart for years. There were new things, for sure. The girls mostly all had new clothes and supposedly new hairstyles. It seemed important that other kids thought that their lives had changed and that they had a fresh start to things.

I still saw eye to eye with some of my friends. Peter Crump had shot up while Harris suddenly looked small to me. We had new teachers, new books and new lesson plans. The newness, the novelty… it all glimmered for a brief moment. It might as well have been Groundhog Day or Valentines Day or April Fools Day because I soon felt that I had been there for ages. Everything was happening around me. Separate from me.

The real sting came when I thought about home. I didn’t want to mention anything about my parents. To anyone. I didn’t want to talk about my summer. I didn’t know what was going to happen, so I didn’t want to say how things had shifted.

The one consolation I had was that I had known something bad was coming and I figured it had arrived. The sad look in Adrienne’s eyes when she left me in the dark in Niagara Falls. My Aunt Claire’s hug that felt just that bit too long. Even thinking about Miss Prankle and our chat earlier that summer. I’d known something was up.

But for some reason that I couldn’t shake, I still had this feeling of foreboding. The wind was still taunting me with words that were just beyond my hearing. The forest didn’t look friendly to me anymore. The angle of the sun through the trees in the early autumn usually seemed crisp and alive to me. But it all felt like a false mask, as though it was going to peel back and reveal an oozing, slithering shadow that would stain the tree trunks and coat the rocks.

Miss Prankle was away. I wanted to talk to her but her place was closed up. I’d thought of going to see Mr. Danby. I knew that Fall Equinox was in less than three weeks. I had it marked on the calendar in a secret kind of way with a drawing of the sun. I’d be visiting him soon enough and then off to some other time.

I wondered if this Drift would be so dangerous that I wouldn’t make it back. That would serve them right! They screw up and then their son disappears into the mists of time. I could hear my Dad saying to my Mom that she was being melodramatic when she talked like that. Was I like her, or like him? At the moment, I didn’t want to be either. Anything but them.

I started to wonder if I’d ever reconnect with what life felt like.

It sounds freakish to say it, but when we heard that a plane had struck the north tower at the World Trade Center that morning of the 11th, I felt an odd calm settling around me. The world was ripping itself apart. It was the end of all existence. It was horrifying in a distant and otherworldly way. We watched on the televisions. Kids and teachers cried. Some wailed even. Everybody was stunned and shocked.

And in those moments, I felt the world and me… we clicked back into sync. It was like a pin on a floodgate had broken… you could hear the tiny noise and then, in one sudden and devastating whoosh, it all gushed out, charging like water that overtakes and crushes everything in its path. That’s what the events of 9/11 did to me.

I still felt numb, but now everyone around me did, too.