IN TRANSITION #7
This is one in a series of occasional reports about the strange time between getting a college diploma and entering real life.
Four years ago, I awoke on the last day of my summer vacation groggy and annoyed. Hoping to sleep late, I had lingered in bed, despite the noisy television in the living room. I thrashed about between the sheets, cursing under my breath. I threw a pillow over my face.
I hadn't slept well for over a week. Last in my dorm suite to move in, I got stuck with the top bunk in a bedroom with a snorer. A loud snorer. So loud, he kept me up even from the futon in the next room over.
However, that night was supposed to be different. For the first time since arriving in Boston, I had the bunks, not to mention the bedroom, to myself. My roommate, home for a funeral in Georgia, had granted me a respite from his snores, and I had charted a night of eight-plus glorious hours of uninterrupted, silent slumber.
That was, until my rude awakening. Fading in and out of a dreamy haze, I caught only muffled snippets from the other side of the door. A plane crash. Evacuations.
Four years later, the exact moment eludes me when I finally succumbed to consciousness, slumped off the top bunk, and stumbled toward the television. Was it before or after the second plane hit? I watched the towers collapse live, in real time. I'm sure of it. The shock. Having to force myself to exhale. I remember it. So clearly. I think.
The events of that unceremonious day, so searing at the time, have inevitably bled together into a painful, jumbled patchwork of television replays, tearful stares, and befuddled introspection. I wandered around campus, still a foreign and unfamiliar place, making eye contact with strangers. How many had family members missing? Would classes begin as scheduled tomorrow? Could Harvard be a target? Would my roommate ever return from Georgia? How far away this city, Boston, where I knew virtually no one, seemed from everyone and everything I knew and loved.
My mother in Arizona tried my cellphone and dorm phone, but couldn't get through.
Her e-mail message: ''There's no way to call long distance all circuits are busy. Thank goodness for e-mail," she had written by noon to me and my brother, who was in England. The subject line? ''Uncertainty."
''This is about the most horrible state of the world I have personally experienced, and having my kids so far away just makes it so much worse."
I told her I would keep in touch. And for reasons that escape me, I went on and promised to ''let you know what's going on" -- as though being hundreds of miles closer to the epicenter of the tragedy made me somehow suited to grasp what was happening.
Classes began on Wednesday as scheduled. After an all-day train ride before the week's end, my snoring roommate returned. And in the midst of such chaos, the semester, like any other, gave way to lectures, papers and midterms, staplers, books, and pens.
Today, people across the planet will mark this fourth anniversary with vigils, marches, and moments of silence. As a newly initiated member of the real world, this is my first Sept. 11 out of college.
I am wide awake now. I just wish I knew what to do.
Benjamin Toff now lives in Somerville. He can be reached at benjamin.toff@gmail.com.
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