That Day / Those People

This in an unfinished project of five monologues based on the reactions I witnessed on September 11, 2001. This is the only one I've been able to finish, and though I intend to do the others, I feel that I need more time to sit back and deal with my own feelings before I put myself in the frame of mind to think like someone else.

I was always as much of an Atheist as someone can be without out right saying that there isn’t a God. But today, for the first time in my life, I prayed. I don’t know who I prayed to, or if they listened, I just know that it was one of the most pain-filled things I’ve done in my life. It’s all really murky, all I really remember is sitting there in class, the radio making up the only noise beyond the stifled tears. I...I had my hands over my face, kinda clasped there, y’know, with my palms on my eyes. The announcer’s voice was shaking. And, I don’t really know how it started, I just... The only thing I really remember saying was, uh, protect them. Please, please, protect them. I don’t know who “them” was, I don’t...don’t think I knew even then. Maybe, I meant the people injured, and trapped under the building. Or, the people who were under threat by attack, or who had lost family and friends, or these who had already added to the numbers of the dead. Or maybe I was thinking of every person who will spend the rest of their lives with this day engraved in their minds, knowing where they were, what they did, and what they thought. The people who are sitting in their desks, their eyes glazed. The people like me, who found something happening inside them that the didn’t think they were capable of. Maybe “them” was everybody, humankind as a whole. Because, something in our collective nature must have gone horribly, horribly wrong for something like this to happen. I know, that I’ll always remember this day. That moment, where I was, what I was doing, what I was thinking. I will always remember that the moment I took my hands away from my face, was the moment the announcer told the room that the second building had fallen.