9/11

I wonder how many blogentries are about September 11th, 2001 today?

The date hit me earlier this evening as I for the first time in my life gave blood at the hospital. I signed up three weeks ago and got a letter last week saying my blood was clean and they'd like me to come. As I lay back in the hospital chair I looked at the big clock on the wall with the date showing with black figures. I had twenty minutes of time to think about that day five years ago while the cradles with blood bags swooshed back and forth in the room.

For me, thinking back on 9/11 isn't just thinking about a historic event and how it affected me and the world. It's thinking back on another part of my life on a different continent, on a different way of life, and most of all thinking back on people that I then talked to every day but now only talk to via e-mails or MSN.

Lovely Dan waking me up with a phone call at 6 am on September 12th talking about World War Three and the end of the world.

American Amanda whose boyfriend got stuck at LAX when his flight was grounded.

My mum who was flying from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur when it all happend and how she sent me a happy text message from KL saying: "I'm in Kuala Lumpur now, or "KL" as they say here! ;) Getting on the next flight in an hour, see you in Sydney!!"
And my frantic reply: "LOOK AT THE NEWS!!!"

Sitting in the grad lounge at my college with Dan and a bunch of other students, watching the news over and over again while morning broke on the September 12th (it took me weeks before I realised the rest of the world was calling it September 11th).

And, when it finally sank in, walking through Sydney's airport less than 24 hours after the atttack, as empty as I've ever seen it, CNN on every tv and groups of people standing before them talking in hushed voices. The luggage lockers were all closed off and the arrival/departure boards showing rows of red "CANCELLED" signs.

The relief of seeing my mum for the first time in nine months. What a day to travel literally across the globe...

Suddenly I was living in a country going to war together with America. Anthrax became a new English word for me when my university department got closed down for a day.

And when the ANZAC soliders marched in to Afghanistan I was sitting on the banks of a jungle river in Yungaburra, seeing a platypus in the wild for the first time in my life.

There is no connection but these are the memories the date of September 11th bring to me.