There’s no light any longer in my life, the world has seemed to collapse. Tuesdays are usually so simple; there was nothing special in September. Before my life had its qualities, its luxuries. There was no care but grades and parental squabbles. I can’t believe I fought with them. I want to see them once more, or go back in time to when I did, and tell them I really didn’t hate them. I wonder if I will ever get the chance to say it.

I pretended to be sick; I didn’t want to go to school. But now as I sit and watch the television, no sickness truly impeding my health, I wish I was within the safe walls of my school. I didn’t awake to an alarm as I normally did, after the fight last night Mom and Dad didn’t even try getting me up. Instead I awoke to a different alarm, my own alarm, to explosions then sirens that perpetually blared.

As I climbed out of bed and found my way to the television, I didn’t know what I’d see, and then I saw it. It was on every channel, this picture of black smoke. Did anyone ever see something so foreboding. The camera moved too quickly to count the floors. Were they below the smoke or under it? She was in the northern campus, he in the southern. I saw things fluttering out of the twins; I wondered how they could catch paper on camera. Thank goodness shock protected me at time from the reality that phenomenon held.

I picked up the phone to call my friend, and then I realized everyone was at school. I looked out the window and saw the unthinkable. The smoke was not too far away; it was reaching the window now, our fancy Manhattan flat now darkening. But this wasn’t just smoke, it was no longer black, instead it was gray. I stood motionless as I watched the avalanche of dirt, dust, and destruction obscures my view from the tenth floor window.

Day was gone; the only indication of time came from the television. It also indicated what I had seen before my very eyes. The twins, that contained my entire world, collapsing. What do I do now?

A police officer came to take me away, away from my home. He brought me to the one piece of my old world I had left. I’ll be moving away from the city with Dad, he was able to escape with his life, but not much else. I will find a new world, one away from the people who took my mom away from me, and one of peace.