The Weather is Fitting

Five years ago I woke up to one of my roommates screaming "Fire fire!" I thought she was talking about something in the apartment so I tried frantically grabbing my most valuable possessions. Then she told me to look at the t.v. It's somewhat ironic that I got a new shower curtain with a photograph of the Brooklyn Bride circa 1950, the Towers on the left, tall and almost out of place now. Rob began today's yoga practice asking us to dedicate this hour to someone in need, still, something lost. It is grey and the sky is holding back the rain. Sometimes I wonder how the weather seems to fit with a moment, grey and like this when I went to the concentration camps, warm summer rains on first date nights, a chill fall air to walk home with someone you just met. But getting back to today, five years ago. I was taking my poem to be copied for one of my first writer's workshops of grad school. I was thinking that everything would be back to normal, and that night I would be workshopping poems. The woman in the office told me I was in the middle of a panic attack, that my body was in shock and that it felt it had to continue with the normal routine. I remember how still the city was. I went out for Chinese for lunch since we had no food and everyone was just quiet. I remember coming back to my apartment to look at walls with nothing yet hung, thinking that I was somehow being cheated of my MFA experience. My school became a triage center and everything was off kilter and could not be righted.