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And that’s how we finish out the shower. With lingering kisses. Warm smiles. Loving touches and rinsed bubbles.

It’s not lost on me that we move around each other with ease through the rest of the morning. An impossibly huge smile spreads across my face as I realize we have our own routine. “For you,” he says, handing me my to-go mug of coffee as I adjust my bag on my shoulder. Ever the gentleman, he opens the door for me, extending his hand to the side as I walk past him.

And ever the sex fiend, he grabs my ass in the process, slapping it lightly as I walk to my car. Leaning around me, he opens my door. The sun sparkles high in the sky, casting its warm rays down on us. The leaves rustle along the ground, the early offerings of a cool autumn tumbling over our feet. “Have a good day.” Leaning in, he kisses me. Though it’s simple and sweet, it speaks volumes to me. “Love you. Talk to you later,” he says as he turns to walk toward his car.

“Love you, too.”

A kiss blown in the wind falls on his back, a subtle reminder of how much I love him to stay with him through the day.

“You seem awfully chipper this morning,” Tim observes aloud as I walk into the room. After this morning’s shower session, I have definitely been a little lighter on my toes. In fact, I doubt anyone has signed in this morning with as much enthusiasm as I have. “What’s gotten into you?”

His question, echoing the words of David’s from last night, elicits a chuckle of a response from me. “Oh, nothing,” I dismiss, setting my coffee down on my desk.

Looking over at me with an ‘uh huh, yeah sure’ look plastered to his face, he pushes forward. “Nothing?” He laughs. “No one is this happy to be at work at ten to seven in the morning. Even people who love their jobs. Spill it.” Dropping his heels from their perch on his desk, his chair creaks as he spins to turn toward my desk.

“Just happy this morning. Can’t say much more.”

“Can’t or won’t?” he presses on, taking a sip of his coffee.

“I was raised never to kiss and tell. So I’m sure as heck not going to kiss and tell
twice.
”

His coffee goes everywhere. Scattering like a fool, he moves to wipe up the spewed-out coffee from the papers on his desk. A few attempts at a response get stuck in his mouth, unlike his coffee. And luckily for him, a group of his first period students walk in, looking like zombies of course. They break up the non-conversation and I excuse myself as I make my way to the room in which my study hall is held.

“Today we’ll be starting some background notes on Arthur Miller and his definition of tragedy,” I begin the lecture to my second period class. Like any early morning lecture would be, my words are met with little more than a few groans of disapproval. Ignoring their not-so-silent protests as best as I can, I wait patiently while the twenty-five students open their notebooks and take out their pens. “In the model of the classic tragedy, you have a hero of very high status coming to his demise through a massive conflict. These are the types of conflicts usually affecting a nation or an entire population over whom the hero usually has control.”

A hand flies up in the third row and I bounce on my toes, excitedly calling on the young girl whose name and face I still haven’t paired up. “Can I go to the bathroom?” My hope of the epiphany of a question I was waiting for walks out the door, behind third-row-girl and her not so urgent need to use the bathroom.

“And then we have tragedy the way Miller sees it.” Clicking on a few icons on the overhead computer, I pull up an image depicting the tragic hero as Miller sees him. “You see, the real tragedy is the story of the everyday man, who has a family and children perhaps. He lives a good life, but comes to his downfall through what most would consider a non-essential conflict.”

“So he’s a nobody?” Chris, one of the few kids actually awake and listening, chimes in as I pause to pull up another graphic.

“No,” I dismiss his conclusion immediately. “Everybody is somebody to someone. Just because you don’t know the person doesn’t mean they aren’t important. You don’t have to be a national icon in order to matter.”

“Yeah right.” A kid in the back row snickers. “No one cares unless you’re Kanye or a Kardashian.”

Taking advantage of what most would call a teachable moment, I close out the icons on the screen and pull up an image of ground zero and what it looked like the day after the attacks. Lines of people surrounded the pile of debris. Forming a conveyor belt of buckets, they worked to remove an endless sea of broken concrete and twisted steel searching in vain for anybody’s somebody.

“You see Kanye in there?” I point to the screen for the emphasis that isn’t needed. “How old were you when this happened?”

A quiet voice calls out from the front, “Three.”

Nothing more than toddlers, they were protected from the horrors of that day. Having only learned what they know of it through stories and images which are seared into our collective memory, they’ve missed the magnitude of the event that only witnessing it firsthand can provide. The hellish nightmare of planes flying into buildings.

Of people choosing to jump to their deaths rather than perish in a fiery inferno.

Of heroes climbing hundreds of flights of stairs in the hopes of saving one person’s life.

Who will be there to remember my son?

“Let today serve as a reminder that a hero doesn’t need to be a national figure. He doesn’t have to be of high importance, reigning over millions of people. He doesn’t have to have a lavish fortune to mean something.” Clicking on a few more images of the dust-covered people, terrified for their lives, running through the streets of lower Manhattan, I continue, “He doesn’t even have to be a he.” Pausing, I let their silence settle in. Before continuing, I open a picture from David’s firehouse. The names of the men who gave their lives that day are emblazoned on the side of their truck. Next to it is the image of the truck, twisted around itself in a heap of what used to be the Twin Towers.

“Sometimes, our biggest heroes are the ones who, on the surface were no one at all. But I guarantee you, these people.” pausing, I point to the names on the truck, “And all the other people who were killed that day were all heroes to someone.”

“Ms. McCann,” Mrs. Gallagher’s eerily calm voice cuts through the end of my speech, mingling with the metallic sound of the bell dismissing class.

My stomach drops. I was off task. This wasn’t part of the lesson I submitted at the beginning of the week. There was no wrap up. I didn’t assign homework. Fumbling through my own short comings, I walk to the door, escorting out the final student on my way to my boss.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t–”

My apology dies on my lips when June drops a hand to mine. “It’s David.”

After those two words, there’s nothing but a black void of nothingness, swallowing me whole, drowning me in a sea of terror.

At first, the only thing I have is darkness. I’m lost in a world of nothing. No noise. No feeling. No warmth. No sleep or rest.

I can’t even tell if I’m alive.

If someone were to ask me how long my existence stayed like that, I wouldn’t be able to tell them.

Because there is no time.

Pitch black defines my day and night. Yet there’s no real difference between the two.

The only thing I can grasp a hold of is the numbness. There’s no pain, just this loopy sort of euphoria.

Then everything turns fuzzy, grey almost. The harsh, straight lines that look like they’ve been drawn there with a ruler and a Sharpie soften. The edges of my existence lighten, turning a dark shade of grey first, and then lighter as time—on which I still have no grasp—moves on.

Distant and almost indistinguishable, a beeping sound comes into focus. All too quickly, it’s blaring in my ears.

Then there’s pain.

Excruciatingly, my head throbs. The loud chaos of screams echo in my ears, nearly drowning out the beeping, but the constant
beep beep beep,
tinny and electric sounding, holds steady behind it.

The cacophony carries on. At one point it turns ghoulish. What was once a loud and mostly annoying noise turns frightening. Long fingers pull at me, clawing me toward the dark. Tension and unease vibrate around me, and it dawns on me that I’m afraid.

More hands grab at me, moving me in a direction I don’t want to go. I want nothing more than to scream, to fight back, but I can’t. No matter how hard I try to do anything, all I feel is pain. All I hear are the voices in the darkness, coaxing me to fall away with them.

Somehow, they’re kept at bay. Maybe it’s the hazy, loopiness that usually follows the most frightening of the darkness, but eventually, the noises are silenced.

The hands that once clutched at me, threatening to take me away with them, clawing and scratching at me, evaporate as if they’d never been there in the first place.

From harsh black lines, to fuzzy grey edges, my existence shifts once again. This time it changes to soft, yellow globes of light.

The hands return, but they’re different now. Rather than dragging me down, they’re lifting me up, pushing me away from them as if I’m no longer welcome.

The pain, that was once so severe I willed the ghouls to pull me under, lessens. Alleviated somehow, it becomes bearable, less damning.

Calm settles around me and the horrid sound of dying voices fades away, making way for the repetitive
beep beep beep
once more.

Something makes the beeps indistinguishable.

More voices.

Far less frightening than those of the ghouls, these ones are hushed, quiet, and nervous. There’s a weight pulling on them, making them somber and numb.

When I first recognize there’s a pattern to the light filling my vision, a distinctive dark and light repeating itself, some of the warmth I’d been craving returns. The pattern of numbness following pain becomes less frequent, making the sharp piercing in my head feel more and more like a dull ache.

A song plays.

Night.

Day.

The song.

Night

Day.

The song.

Night.

Day.

The song.

I begin to look forward to it. It brings me peace, bathing me in happiness.

A touch startles me. Not because it’s harsh or jarring.

But because I felt it.

For the first time in however long I’ve been stuck like this, I make a conscious effort to move. Concentrating on the soft feel on my skin, I force my brain to move my hand.

Except the connection between my brain and my fingers no longer exists. Stuck in an endless loop of commanding my body to do something it’s incapable of doing, and internally wailing at my failure, I fade away into exhaustion as night returns once again.

Night.

Day.

The song.

The touch.

The struggle to touch in return.

Night.

Day.

The song.

The touch.

The struggle to touch in return.

It’s an endless cycle. But the song.

That song calls to me on a level I don’t yet understand.

And the touch.

Bringing warmth to my frigid existence, I come to crave it and its daily return.