I wish everyone would stop fussing about my birthday you said the week before when I was busy planning my escape from my job so on that special day believe me I had more on my mind than your birthday as I held my carefully-composed resignation letter gleefully close waiting for the right moment to spring it on my boss when someone yelled that a plane had just flown into the World Trade Centre where’s that oh yeah New York that’s weird and I thought crap now I am going to have to wait until the fuss dies down so I can go in there and tell my boss I am leaving three days short of eight years of all the luck a frigging plane had to crash into some building in New York just as I was trying to resign so I sit impatiently waiting for my escape clause when the office radio blares the news that a second plane has crashed into the other tower and suddenly it is no longer a wayward pilot no tragic accident but something really big and our brains aren’t working because it doesn’t make sense the image on my laptop screen shows smoking towers and then a building collapses oh my god there are people in those buildings and reports that some are jumping I feel sick the scenes of dust-covered terrified victims fleeing at street level and all of us miles away are also in shock and starting to think about who we might have known in those buildings and they are no longer an image on a screen but a tragedy of mythic proportions and how small am I to be pissed off about not being able to resign that day when people who maybe loved or hated their jobs and arrived a short time ago this morning as I did are now dead or dying so I tuck my letter into my briefcase for another day and pick up the phone to call you up north and ask are you happy now that no one is talking about your birthday
c. 2010 Glenda MacDonald (written in Canada on September 11, 2001)