Where were you?

Sometimes something so tragic happens that whenever people get together to talk about it, inevitably the question becomes “Where were you when you heard?  What were you doing when you saw it on tv, read it in a paper, saw it on a streaming site?” What’s strange about this (to me anyway), is the people asking those questions, having that breathless conversation (maybe over drinks with people you’ve never met before and don’t care if you meet again), are never the ones who were there or who had a piece of themselves destroyed that choose to speak about where they were.   It’s never the mother, father, friend, daughter, co-worker or the poor sod who had to pick up the bits left behind who have that conversation (at least not with me but maybe my own prickles keep the people with the raw open wounds from confiding their own memories of one of the worst days of their lives.)  The first of the “where were you” moments for me happened when I was a child just discovering that the world around me wasn’t always so safe.   But I wasn’t there, in that moment.  I saw it on a TV and even then, it was years before I understood that what I’d seen was a collective tragedy that echoed through a people that thought “No, this could not happen.   Not here.” My child self knew something awful had happened, that the front of a building shouldn’t ever look like that when there are people inside, that 144 (what I remember now, nearly 30 years later and probably wrong) is a lot of people murdered.  But I do remember the room I was sitting in, and a blue couch with soft wood arms that I would scrape patterns into with my fingernails while watching TV.   The room was white, and the end tables that matched that terrible couch had lamps on them that were bulbous and blue, with white lampshades.  And I was alone, and watching something, and the report came on.  And for the first time, a tragedy outside myself, something that had nothing to do then, and still not much to do now with my day to day life, made me feel something.  A sadness, maybe, but not really, because my immediate response wasn’t tears or sympathy for those people or their families, or their co-workers who got out or just got lucky they weren’t there that day.  It was a poem.  A bad one.  A “where were you” poem for people who also had a “where were you.” Something to talk about how shocking it was, that it could make me write about such things so young.  It wasn’t a where were you.  It was a “look at me” as many of those conversations are.  Shallow.  To go with the drinks with people you don’t care if you see again.