Columbia
February 03, 2003 @ 9:14 a.m.
So.
The Columbia.
I don't really know what to say about it, necessarily. Because it came as a shock, as it should have. My mother called to tell me, on her way home from her Saturday job. And I went downstairs and turned on the television, and watched for a few hours. I watched Peter Jennings hold up a plastic model of a space shuttle and explain about the heat shield, and its possible failure. I watched President George W. Bush speak to the country, and hissed angrily when he brought up Isaiah.
As I watched all the debris floating down from the sky, time and time and time again. I watched the ship explode, or break up, or do whatever it did. And I cannot understand how human flesh and soles of their shoes can be found. Dancing around in the upper atmosphere, blasted apart by what seemed to be a series of explosions, I can't get right in my mind how such an easy thing to damage could have been preserved in the jet stream.
Through all of this, however, I was amazed at how the horror wasn't as real. Everything was, in fact, surreal in my mind. This wasn't happening. It was numbing. It was impossible.
But it was happening, and as hazy as it felt, I could see it clearly on television. It was as though the events on 9/11 were fogging my perception. I could see it was happening and yet it wasn't as horrifying as it should have been. I should have been clawing my insides out, like I wanted to with 9/11. The enormity of another disaster is unwittingly hard to understand.
The only thing keeping me focused on what happened, instead of pretending it never happened (or forgetting it did), are statements like these:
"Earlier, residents in east Texas reported finding a torso, a thigh bone, a skull and a leg at two different sites, all badly charred."
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