I Want To Walk Through You, Please

At six twenty-five this morning my Mum called the apartment. I was two and a half minutes into five minutes of snooze that would have been repeated three or five times had the phone not rung. In a world where apples are meant to be a better wake-up assistant than coffee, it turns out that a distraught parent is better than both; possibly better than apple flavour coffee.

Mum heard the news on UK early breakfast television, and waited until just before 11.30am to call us, worried that we would take the subway without being aware of the alert. Mum didn't know about the press conference here last night where Bloomberg gave the details of the threat.

The warning of a terrorist attack on the subway meant that I was much more aware of eye contact this morning, and there was a lot of it about. The downtown 4/5 was practically empty, and it is normally packed to the gunnels.
(I imagine the gunnels are quite high up on a subway car)

Before I left the apartment I asked Krissa to call my Mum when she got to her office, to let her know she was all right, and I planned to do the same. I was reining in the more gruesome aspects of my imagination while on the train, but the second I hit the steps coming out of the station I began to think about how much more of a target that station was; a four-track station under a major city administrative building, and how old that building was, and how tall...
And all of a sudden I was grabbed by panic and I longed to walk through all of the slowly puttering commuters in front of me like so much mist.

Today marks one year since I moved to New York. Every time something like this comes on the news I am not so much scared by it as I am worried that my family will worry, and my Mum in particular. We all knew that New York was a terror target when I moved here for love.The distance amplifies the sense of powerlessness which everyone has to deal with when faced with such a vague, far-reaching danger. It's bad enough with me downtown and Krissa in midtown, so what it must be like for Mum from England...

For what it's worth, the anniversary of my arrival being marred by the looming threat of terrorism does not change the act of looking back over the year, which can be summed up nicely as this:

I've still got a map in my bag, but I'm unintentionally losing the t's on the ends of words.

Oh, and I still think 'please' when panicking.