The Silent Blue

September twelfth, seven years ago...

The sky over my house was empty of anything built by man. It was blue, clear, and silent - no jet roar, prop buzz, or rotor thud. No sulphur yellow-grey creeping up from the horizon, smirching the dome of my world. Only nature and her noises, and the distant sound of the almost-empty highway (people were still stunned, sitting still and waiting to breathe again).

It was a hopeful day - maybe they would find someone alive, maybe they would find a pocket, a miracle, a place where angels, fairies, saints, goddesses, superheroes or ancestors had held up twisted metal and rent concrete, had turned them aside, had extinguished fire and cleared poison from the air to make a little haven in which hundreds huddled, simply waiting to be discovered by clever eyes and ears. Maybe.

As the day stretched to the breaking point, no havens, great or small, appeared. No portals to other worlds, no dimensional bubbles, opened and released victims and heroes to the ones waiting on this side with a hopeless sort of hope for another living soul, another survivor, another reason to send up a ragged cheer and to reach into the murky well of possibility again for more, more, more.

I felt powerless and lost, hurt and angry, and bewildered and driven to seek answers.

I went out into the sunlight, looked up and felt peaceful. Empty of mankind, the sky was a blessing above, a place to lose myself; I stared up and let my eyes go wide and watery, head tilted back so all I saw was the endless open; never blinking, mind unfocused, released, all of my being an exhalation - I felt my feet lift from the ground, gravity unleashing me for all of an eternal moment to float and dissipate into the upward pull, uninterrupted by reminders of anything wrong with this quiet, the empty, clean morning sky, the silent blue.

For a moment, reality relinquished me to the crossroads of all-that-was and all-that-could-be, and I was full to bursting with all-things-being-now-and-never-and-always.

Soon enough I found my way back downward to feet firmly planted, a crick in my neck and a salty stiffness on my cheeks. The peace, though...the peace lasted. My sky wasn't clouded with still-smoking, dust-choking clouds of the gods only know what...I was far, far away from that with an empty mind, an aching heart, and the certain knowledge that things would start up again...if not exactly as before then much like...and that there would be a terrible price paid for the previous day's events.

We have yet to finish the tally.