Fall From the Sky
In my dream we stood in a crowd on the ground, looked up, and watched God fall out of the sky. At least, that’s what everyone said happened. They could see his hand brush over the sun the same day the buildings collapsed and then it seemed like we saw an entire man fall from the sky. Perhaps we did see him fall. Perhaps it was just our imagination. I saw that hand cross over the sun again and again, I saw the terrified face of a spirit fall from the heavens. I felt the panic well up in my own chest as the terror of what I was seeing dawned on me, when I realized it wasn’t God at all, but just a man. Just a man falling from the top of the tower.
It wasn’t a dream.
Some times the visions and the imagining could be considered dreams. The event was real.
One time I went to a seance on the eleventh of November, five years after the terrorist attacks. One of the participants went into a trance and said he could see the buildings burning and the people leaping from the top of the towers.
I stared and sat silently. I was eighteen during the seance. Thirteen when the attacks happened and I could remember sitting in the school library watching the television as the second plane crashed into the tower. With all that cloud and smoke, who could say God didn’t fall from the sky? We were children and for an entire day our eyes were glued to the devastation. The teachers had put lessons on hold and turned on every TV. I know that some kids didn’t even know the attacks happened until they got home from school. But we knew. We saw everything through that screen and static.
The others at the seance gushed at the man who said he saw these things, but no one thought to suggest that what he saw had anything to do with 9/11 or that he wasn’t making it up.
In my dream I am standing on the ground and watching the planes crash into the buildings. After the first one no one really seems to care. It is just an accident. Then I see them running as the streets fill with the shadow of the second airplane and it slams itself into the second tower.
After that day I wondered why anyone would want to write a story. Horror, devastation, hope, death and war were all apart of our reality. We tried to hide from it and tell ourselves that it only existed in novels. Then we read those novels for our pleasure and criticize the writers who imagined such horrific tales, saying that something must be wrong with them. Nothing is wrong with the writer. Something is wrong with the world.
In my dream I see the towers fall. Then I watch a hand brush over the sun, and God falls from the sky.
It’s not fiction, but today I decided to write it down.
