i finally got an a in something : )

(my latest short story for english 364)

Empty Sky

After high school we followed our childhood dreams and moved there. We were so in love, running around the busy streets and dropping into little dives on the corners that had better Chinese than my mom could have ever prepared. I loved the energy of the place, the buildings stretching into the clouds, the taxis reverberating through the canals of streets. Best of all I loved our apartment, a little studio in the meatpacking district. At first it appeared cold, but you and I we made it sensual and cozy. We covered the brick walls with the tapestries you brought me back from your senior trip to Italy. I bought the softest linens I could find for our bed. Many a lazy Saturday afternoon we spent tangled up in those sheets cuddling away the world and school and work and forgetting about it all in each other’s eyes.
I spent late afternoons and evenings up on the roof in my deteriorating lawn chair reading about Gestalt psychology for my classes. As night fell, I would light those Catholic Jesus candles you got me at the market and look at the whole wide world stretched out before me. The taxis pulsed down the streets like soldiers in an army of ants on a voyage. If you looked far enough you could see the water, and beyond that, Lady Liberty. On a night like this you came up with a bottle of wine you had procured from the liquor store down the street we both knew never ID’d, and as night flowed down over all the towers and the taxis and the airplanes in the sky you promised me that one day you would marry me. This was city life.
On Tuesday you left for your morning class and I began my usual routine of reading over the paper as the TV news hummed in the background. But today the news didn’t hum; it screamed. It screamed in bright shades of bold red text and uncertain news anchors and panicked citizens and clouds of smoke and falling debris. I took my coffee to the rooftop and watched in horror as it all fell down in the distance. I spent the rest of the day feeding off a steady diet of CNN and astonishment. I watched as people in sheer desperation jumped from windows to their eminent death. I had never witnessed anything like this before. You came home unharmed but very shaken and told me I needed to take a break from the television. We went up to the rooftop with a bottle of wine and tried to discuss other things, but the other departments of my mind were closed. It was in my mind and it was in my face. To the west, it was much easier to see the water now. The traffic had stopped, and the once bustling city streets filled with agitated taxis now contained only a few confused stragglers who must have been wondering where the world goes from here.
I looked up at the sky. There was nothing. Any other night there would have been airplanes and satellites and spaceships and maybe Donald Trump in one of his ridiculous gold helicopters, but tonight there was nothing but an empty sky. The President had imposed a grounding of all aircraft for at least the next day. The sky was empty and it scared the shit out of me. On this day, everything had fallen out of the sky: people, buildings and airplanes. The sky had nothing more to give, and now it was empty like I’d never seen it before.
The city began its mourning process. American flags adorned every surface, and the President began using words like “freedom”, “justice” and “terrorism”. You told me it was all going to be alright, that we would make it through all this eventually, but I couldn’t shake my fears. The faces of the missing on hand made posters haunted me at the subway. I could not get used to the gap to the west, I didn’t like the better view of the water. I eventually stopped going up to the rooftop. You tried to distract me. We spent afternoons in bed, but I couldn’t help but fear that the building was going to come crashing down on me, destroyed by evil.
When we took a trip back home for Thanksgiving I told you I couldn’t come back there with you. You were crushed, but you knew why I couldn’t stay there anymore. You promised me when you finished school you would come back for me. I hoped you were telling the truth. I loved you and I loved the city, but the city had shown me everything I never wanted to know about the world. It showed me all the things I had turned my head away from for the past nineteen years, and it showed me that ignorance is bliss.