MONOLOGUE SHOWCASE
Posted on August 30, 2024 Leave a Comment
EVENT ALERT
MONOLOGUE SHOWCASE II: Voices of Healing and Transformation
September 16, 7-8:30 PM. A composite of short stories written for the stage, performed by professional actors. You are invited as a guest, free-of-charge, to attend this LIVE event where my own work will be debuted.
Click on the link above (“Monologue Showcase II” ) to register for this Virtual Live event hosted by the International Women’s Writer’s Guild. A Zoom link will be sent to the email address you provide on the Registration page.
You may also register to attend Monologue Showcase I, featuring another group of talented writers and actors. This Free LIVE event will take place September 8, 7-8:30 PM ET.
BESIEGED
Posted on August 29, 2024 1 Comment
Pushing through the insidious hours in the tunnel to September 11th, I am assailed by the confluence of opposing needs: productivity and grace. I want to write, reach, submit, yet find myself besieged by the inevitability of sharp presence contained within the eighth page of the calendar. After twenty-three years I know this beat by now, yet the shadow anxiety always niggles into the house like a field mouse before I’m swarmed, standing on the kitchen counter, screaming.
Today’s post is a surrendering of what I hold as publish-worthy prose to journalistic testimony in the raw. In the spirit of old-world blogging and the wave of Substack newsletters, I am validating anything I write as worthy of the page. Productivity and grace.
8/27/2024 – Tuesday, VT. 12:05 AM:
Terminated my mother-in-law’s aide. Turned the guard over to RG. Returned to Vermont Sunday night. Cat held his bowels.
My brain is a hot mess. Feeling lost in a cerebral quag of spatter and mire, where synapses fail end to end. Absentminded, unfocused. Lost in days of lofty goals, plunging into nightfall plundered by the black raven culling Threads in my phone. Last night I shut my eyes at 3 AM. The night before 2. And before that 1:30. Restless. I keep gripping the night, reluctant to slack into another dawn, then another… Seized in a world where nothing changes but the deepening fissures of lip and brow. My husband is still dead. My son is still dead. My other son is mortgaging a one-bedroom. Dreams are vapor. The generation before me is degenerative. With no new life to embrace, my circle narrows, aloneness broadens, echoing ever-longer. Persephone! Lead me back to forever, to the World where forever was a concrete noun, like—table, wine, skin, home.
© 2024 Deborah Garcia, all rights reserved. Photo by Deborah Garcia
A MARRIAGE STORY (Commemorating July 25, 1987 – 2024)
Posted on July 26, 2024 2 Comments
“Would you marry me?” He asked casually, as if he were exploring whether I’d join him for a first date at the hometown bar. His bronze arms encircled my waist from behind, our hands clasped, seated on the chest at the foot of the bed in his boyhood room.
I am visiting on a weekend leave from college in March, 1984. David had graduated in December. He left the dining table where we had been chatting with his parents, without returning. When the table-talk ran dry, I walked to the end of the hall, closing the door behind me. He drew me into his lap, embracing me with a firm squeeze. A soft touch of his index and middle fingers tipped my chin around to meet a gentle kiss. A pause, a smile, “I love my dear. What would you say if I asked you to marry me?”
“Well, maybe. I’ll have to think about it.”
In the hiccup of the moment, sans a rehearsed script in my pocket, I choose to engage in the game coyly, by playing hard-to-get. There is no ring, bended knee or waterfall, just two pretend-adults, ages 20 and 22-years old, dressed in shabby-sheik cut-off Levi’s and thrift shop T-shirts.
The mood suddenly turned cool.
He wasn’t playing. David was serious. And although I had known by this time that we were forever lovers, we were in no position in our lives to be tying cans to the bumper of my Chevy Malibu in the seeable future.
He was crushed. The moment fell in my lap to repair the ego I had unwittingly deflated.
Folding into his arms, I looked into his eyes and whispered, “of course I will marry you. Hopefully one day soon, after we’re finished with school and have a place of our own, I’ll be prepared for a more formal proposal.”
On a hot Saturday afternoon in July, 1986, Dave spent the day busying himself with curious tasks. He asked me to buy a box of cracker jacks when I went to the supermarket. An out of character request which caused my face to squinch and echo, “Cracker Jacks?”
Later that evening, David and I went out for dinner at our favorite Italian restaurant in Valley Stream, NY, of which I cannot recall the name. It was a regular choice for us, about one mile from the attic apartment we rented. Always plenty of tables and waitstaff, no need for a reservation. Not too expensive but nice enough to relax and enjoy a house glass of Merlot with fried crisp calamari and steaming plates of penne á la vodka. Dave seemed a bit flustered by the end of the afternoon, working on a project behind our closed bedroom door. I hadn’t thought much about it, since he was always fixing something on the rudimentary IBM PC XT computer we had in there.
“Are you okay, dear?”
He produced two wrapped boxes in his hands.
“Open the smaller box first.”
Lunging to bended knee, he took my hand in his, “Will you marry me dear?”
“Yes I will,” I said as he slid the diamond onto my left ring finger, sealing it with a kiss. My euphoria was broken by the exuberant applause of diners, returning me to the effervescence being poured before us.
He handed me the second package, a box of Cracker Jacks, clearly violated and taped shut.
“Apparently, toy prizes have been replaced by tattoos and riddles pre-1980, because they presented a choking hazard. Who would have thought,” he said. “I went to the convenient store to buy two more different-sized packages and they were all the same! Thinking I could cut open the little package the prize was in and slip in your ring.”
On the eve of July 24th, 1987, Dave stayed back in our Valley Stream apartment joined by friends, while I had driven 40 miles east to my childhood home in East Patchogue. My simple JC Penney off-the-rack gown, that I paid $300 for, stretched across the rear seat of my rusty Malibu. White silk pumps on the floor. There were many things to do, clean the kitchen for the hairdresser, help the girls with their wardrobe, complete assembly of favors. In the home where my fifteen and nineteen-year-old sisters continued to reside with our father, I was also seeking to feel some spiritual connection with my mom and grandmother. The home where my late mother’s red-white-blue afghan still covered the tattered threads of the couch where she last rested five-and-a-half years before.
Anxious from the promise of the day ahead, I awakened at 5:30 in the morning to an odd clacking sound outside. On the other side of the door was a tall white horse, unattended, standing in the street thirty feet before me. A fine-chiseled equine head turned toward me, his large, dark-sienna glassy eyes fixed on my figure through the glass. The atmosphere was silent—no people, cars, or chatter of early birds. It felt transcendental, otherworldly. I pressed my hand to the glass, to feel something solid, the coolness of burgeoning dawn air, to verify that I wasn’t locked in a dream, simply conjuring illusory images on my wedding day.
A white horse is symbolic of a god or hero. It is the only creature pure enough to bear the hero to triumph over evil, while also being vulnerable. White is the rarest color of horses, which is associated with nobility in chivalry, with the sun in Greek mythology, and with the end of the world in Christianity. They are often referred to as psychopomps, guides between the worlds of the living and the dead. A connection between the physical world and the afterlife. A pale horse also bears the figure of death in the Biblical Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Epona, the Celtic horse goddess, rode a white mare to escort souls to the land of the dead and bring dreams.
When removing the gown from its zipped opaque encasement, I discovered a small, distinct, medium-brown mark in the satin fibers of the lower 2/3 front of the skirt. A wave of panic swept through my body. My gown has a dark stain that can’t be unseen! It had been hanging in the bag in my apartment for eight weeks. I had opened it the night before in the presence of a friend, appearing perfectly white.
I dropped to my knees for close examination, unable to determine if it was a pencil or ink mark. It appeared to be neither. Certainly, no matter what it was, the satin could not be treated without leaving a more obvious stain. The mark formed a perfect cross, the prairie wood color of dried reeds, embedded into the delicate weave.
Believing that wedding day jitters were causing me to hallucinate, I called my sister in as a witness. I said, “look at this, and tell me if you see anything odd.”
“Why, what do you see?” she said as she eyed it. “Oh my God, Debbie, what is that?’
“I don’t know, it wasn’t there when I looked at the dress yesterday,” I said.
We stood speechless, feeling like there was an omnipresence in the room. Waves of emotions swirled between us. An energy parting molecules, like a drape rustling at front of the theatre. It felt both portent and reassuring to sense that we were in the presence of ghosts. At 23, I believed anything and knew next to nothing. Does grief unfold in phases, shading joyful moments throughout our lifetimes?
The weather on the South shore of Long Island on July 25th was hazy and humid. By 1:00 PM, a westerly wind began to push across the Atlantic to the berm where we stood in Massapequa Park. Jet-ski’s whooshed by as Peter, Paul, and Mary versed the garden procession where we lit the unity candle, guarding it from the wind with our cupped hands. We danced to Stanley Clarke’s “You Me Together” and gripped the knife that sliced the spiced carrot cake we’d share, ceremoniously, for the next fourteen years. The hot, balmy afternoon concluded in a fierce thunderstorm causing county-wide power outages. It was as though Zeus was striking from the heavens with the blessings and ills of wisdom and destiny.
The gifts he gave to our mortal souls, was the dénouement we took to our bed in the blackness of the unlit night.
© Deborah Garcia 2024, all rights reserved
A CASE OF ENTITLEMENT FOR THE DEFENDANTS IN THE 9/11 MILITARY TRIBUNALS
Posted on June 6, 2024 Leave a Comment
This report is an account of my week in attendance at the pre-trial hearings for the five (currently four) terrorists, aka defendants, accused of conspiring to murder Americans on September 11th, 2001.
THE ACCUSED:
Khalid Shaikh Mohammed (KSM) (Kuwait ) (Principle architect of the attacks, conceived the ‘planes Operation’. Also, plotter of Bojinka Operation. Uncle to Ramzi Yousef-organizer of 1993 WTC bombing and Ammar al-Baluchi-9/11 defendant).
Ammar al-Baluchi (Kuwait, Pakistan) (Transferred money from UAE to hijackers in the US. Courier to Osama bin Laden. Plotted future Karachi plane attack. Nephew of KSM, cousin of Ramzi Yousef).
Walid bin Attash (Saudi Arabia) (Training hijackers and researching fight data. Involved in East Africa Embassy and USS Cole attacks).
Mustafa al Hawsawi (Saudi Arabia) (Key travel and financial facilitator to the hijackers).
Ramzi bin al-Shibh (Yemen) (Financial facilitator and organizer of hijacker cell in Hamburg, Germany. Suspect in USS Cole bombing) (Removed from joint prosecution due to unfit mental state, August, 2023).
THE HEARING May 13-17, 2024:
May 17th wrapped up week five of the 50th pre-trial hearings in the Military Commission’s prosecution of the 9/11 case. Witnesses for the prosecution included Dr. 1/WK51, former JTF medical provider in 2006 and 2007; Special Agent McFadden of the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS); and Colonel Joshua Bearden (Federal prosecutor).
The focus of these hearings was on witness testimony related to the defense motions to suppress the Letterhead Memoranda (LHM) Statements to the FBI. Letterhead Memoranda (LHMs) are summaries of derogatory information created by U.S. federal agencies, specifically in the context of counterterrorism investigations. In this case, they pertain to FBI interviews of the five detainees/defendants after arriving to Guantanamo Bay in 2006, following their CIA custody abroad from the time of their captures from 2002-2003. While in CIA custody, the detainees were subjected to “enhanced interrogation (torture) techniques.” It is this period, from 2003-2006, on which the defense motions that the death penalty and life imprisonment be removed and they be given a day-day award for pretrial punishment credit. Under the Geneva Convention, “collective punishment” is prohibited and the U.S. criminalizes acts of torture of detainees. The (confessed) criminals of the most heinous terrorist attack in history, who murdered my husband and 2,976 innocent people, sickening uncountable others, are entering plea deals based on the criminalization of their capture and detainment, pain and suffering, and PTSD. The defense argues that for their illegal detention, they should be awarded constitutional protections. The delays with no trial dates in sight are “cruel and inhumane to the level of torture.” The defense closed the first day with the statement; “the punishment continues to this day!”
The motions presented are akin to what Colonel Joshua Bearden described as “rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.” The defense motions that the Military Commissions Act of 2006 (MCA) is unconstitutional. The prosecution cites that the MCA is authorized to trial by military tribunal for violation of laws of war, justified under the United States Constitution. Colonel Bearden cites that the detainees are all “Law of War” detainees, which do not constitute pre-trial confinement nor warrant pre-trial credit. “They are being held from the battlefield as alien unprivileged belligerent captives.” He went on to say, “there has never been a case like this, in which terrorists murdered 3,000 individuals. We had to prevent further attacks. At the end of the day, decisions had to be made. The government stands behind them. The 9/11 victims had to make real decisions, faced with real fears.”
The main point of this five-week session has been to decide on trying the case against the detainees in an attempt to negate the capital sentencing scheme imposed by the MCA 2006 ruling based on ex post facto (the ruling came into effect after the detainees had already been detained), and the alleged “Torture Regime,” which took place while in CIA custody before the detainee arrivals to Guantanamo Bay. It was also argued that they were denied Miranda Rights and their right to a speedy trial, violating the 8th Amendment.
Defense statements made in the final session of the week emphasized that “Due Process,” as issued in the 5th Amendment, should be applied, and “the death penalty constitutes cruel and unusual punishment under the 14th Amendment.” They also motioned that “in a capital case, there must be an Enhanced Procedural phase in fairness. In other words, to enable a jury to reach fair reliability in order to make them Death Eligible. The defense claims that “CIA enhanced interrogation techniques equate to a mock execution, which caused the detainees to suffer and give information involuntarily. Through torture, the defendants are entitled to a fair trial in accordance with the Bill of Rights.”
Further arguments in regard to the detainees rights, were made to overstate their rights in a recitation of the 14th Amendment, “no state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States, nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”
Worth pondering is the question of who is a U.S. citizen? Who is entitled to due process of law by the Constitution and the Bill of Rights? How do U.S. covenants apply to international terrorists? How are the victims of terrorism afforded due process of law? For whom is jurisprudence under Constitutional principle?
There is no attempt to deny that the evil entities detained on this U.S. island military detention center were subject to various forms of extreme interrogation methods immediately following their planning and executing the most horrific attack on U.S. citizens in history. Threat to national security was high. However, my husband is dead. My son is dead.
The defendants have 24/7 medical and behavioral health services and complementary legal representation in the most expensive U.S. assisted living facility, at $13.5 million dollars per person, per year. Hearings are adjusted to accommodate their five-times-daily prayers, with the timing changing according to the tilt of the sun. Myself, along with thousands of 9/11 families have spent 23-years advocating for justice, fairness in funding for medical and behavioral health care, and dignified values for our pain and suffering. The punishment continues to this day!
We fear we may never see this (our) case sunset.
At the end of this session, the detainees are gazing at the Caribbean Sea, reading the Quran with U.S. government provided IQRA so they may hear their voices enhanced and beautified.
My beautiful husband and son, still dead.
© Deborah Garcia 2024, all rights reserved
Davin I
Posted on April 8, 2024 Leave a Comment
You could have been content in the sun – at thirty-one. Unfolding a camp chair at the lip of the sandpit on the sixteenth hole, taping ISO 12312 lenses to your frames. You and your brother pushing tripods into mud, assessing filters, discussing apertures, the three of us under the blue, leaning back, gazing up, moon interceding light at the precise point of our nexus, silencing sparrows, blending shadows beneath a single black hoodie, transfixed by incandescent halo, enraptured – pine pond breath becoming negative space. Three minutes, sixteen seconds, celestial bodies suspended between silence and din. One hour, thirty-six minutes, your body suspended between cervix and divination, pushing silence into breath. You crowned thirty-four days early, quietly emerging beneath the fluorescent halo, at the apex of our existence. You were gold skin and hair, Encased in blue light, a tiny mask shielding your eyes from the spectrum that could damage sight – heat milk howl sating negative space between lull and martyr, eight years before his blackout, thirty-one years before yours. You, the luminary subject of our gaze, our three bodies suspended between sun and moon. You could have found resurrection in love, dismissing my remarks about the black flower tattoo clutching her neck. Or perhaps opened a pro-shop weaving gut, piloted a Cessna over Belgrade, shucked oysters in your own piano bar – folly flight fugue. We would probably banter over spoons and sponge, same old same old, who cares? Life is no more than jive and jest. Even if you read To Kill a Mocking Bird, again, in the chair across from mine by the fire, I could pop in special lenses and gaze at your corona with awe. Twenty-seven years, six months, twenty-three days, after the blue moon interceded the astral spectrum, You could pull your heals through the darkness, carving da capos in the sand, reflecting on how feelings felt like facts – breath hum synchronicity. Celestial bodies sedated amid dawn and dusk, silhouetting negative space – blue black argent, heraldic spectacle, gazing through ISO 12312’s at the precise point when the eclipse will pass.
© 2024 Deborah Garcia, All rights reserved
Images by Deborah Garcia
hunger as vow: a triptych
Posted on February 14, 2024 Leave a Comment
[After Sarah M. Sala, Migraine as Whale: A Triptych]
Honoring NYC Retired Firefighter, 9/11 first responder and Nassau County, NY Resident
Posted on February 6, 2024 Leave a Comment
Thank you for your service Bob Beckwith. May you rest in peace.
HOCUS POCUS: Golden Shovel
Posted on October 31, 2023 Leave a Comment
After Jennifer Michael Hecht
When you were twelve, your shadow out cast mine, you’d eat
two bowls of long spiral spaghetti straws twirling in a
meaty sauce I scratched, red, lip-smacking, mmm. Wednesday nights, the donut
shop man is a dervish charmer filling our sack for three dollars for no rhyme
or reason. Once, in a recording studio you improvised a jazz opus
in “F” on your sax and called it Boston Cream. The CD lies on a shelf with
the summer scrapbook wherein you hooked bass in lotus
blooms from your kayak and released grip from the apex of the rope
swing, ooo. I do not know these lines yet, how your body glossed by sunlight is
carving ripples lit by the gloomy rays of the moon. In 2005, you said, Homework is a bogus
way to waste the day, so I’ll study at four A.M. as a hocus
stunt of genius to play Need For Speed after school – hocus-pocus
masking your stash of dark seeds deep in your solar plexus – hocus–
pocus – pitching no-hitters, stroking break points, keying Chopin – hocus-pocus.
Loss is vexing, shame is dispiriting, life is one thing then another. Please dare
to tell someone, if not me, anyone, eat a donut, blow an “F” not–
e, check your pulse on a smart watch, swipe the dark web off your screen, we need you to
be. Don’t close your eyes, there’s so much hope for your tomorrows. Don’t kill
yourself. Bake a cheesecake, hike the Long Trail, take a steam bath, aaa. Kill yourself
and hundreds of other people die. Smash a pumpkin. Smash a hundred. Please stay. I
will give full-sized candy bars to everyone who has figured this out about suicide. Won’t
you help me help you to not get spellbound by the circumstances of the present? I won’t either.
© 2023 Deborah Garcia, All rights reserved
Your memory cannot be erased by the veil of time
Posted on September 11, 2023 Leave a Comment
This souvenir photo was taken in Y2000 on “Take Your Child to Work Day.” Davin was 7-years-old. I took the boys to visit Daddy at work on occasion throughout the year. They would sit at his desk in his cubicle at Marsh & McLennan and play computer games he’d set up on his desktop, pretending to work like Daddy. At lunch time, we’d walk across the street to the Marriott complex, imagining the voyages aboard the grand yachts tied in the harbor outside, ending our visit with lunch under the grand glass-vaulted atrium.
Today, I found myself walking alone in this atrium, now the Brookfield Centre Mall. I watched a little girl of about 6-years of age, skipping up and down the palacial villa-style triple staircase. Her squeals of delight lifted the veil of time, and little boy voices echoed upon the great marbled treads, where a young woman combing her fingertips through a blonde flip, and a man decked in a fine wool suit with a beeper vibrating at his hip, stood at the base, together. Enraptured.
DAVID GARCIA : Age 40. IT Consultant–Marsh McLennan, GHI. WTC 1, 97th F.
DAVIN GARCIA : Age 27 (8). Son. Prolonged Grief Disorder.
© 2023, Deborah Garcia, all rights reserved
September, 2023
Posted on September 2, 2023 Leave a Comment
Autumn has already settled in here, in my home in northern Vermont. Maples are beginning to blush, days topping in the 70’s, evenings into the 50’s.
August has always been a tenuous month, the lead-dog racing into September, pacing through October, charging into the holidays. This used to be my favorite time of year; return to school and normalized work-schedules, empty beaches, crisp air. The swirl of bronzing leaves and the scent of stewed apples provided me with a sense of grounding on the approach of my October birthday, through thirty-seven years of my life. Now, I dread them all. This year, I deluded myself into believing that after twenty-two years of traversing the dark August tunnel to September 11th, I wouldn’t need to refill my benzo prescription. Yet again I find myself on the floor, in child’s pose, heaving. Smacked down by mini breakers, I’m lost in the undertow of all of my designated tasks, questions of purpose, endless solitude and celibacy.
Over the course of this year, free from the constraints of single-parenting, a difficult second marriage, and intense grief over the loss of my son, Davin, in Oct. 2020, I’ve become more present and informed in the supportive and geo-political 9/11 community, of which is both a privilege and a crucible. I’ve engaged in some public speaking opportunities and I participate in bi-weekly family support groups, where I’m proud to have inspired others in the self-healing practice of writing. I’ve dialed in on hours-long conference calls with impassioned, and exasperated family members (mostly widows), phone hearings on active litigations, discussed plans for attending this fall’s hearings for the five unsentenced conspirators held at the Guantanamo Bay Detention Center, Cuba, and had conversations with senators and local representatives regarding the myriad of open issues that severely impact mine and my son, Dylan’s lives. In addition, I continue to spend bloodshot hours studying court dockets, hearings, and legal statutes in order to learn the legal cipher necessary to lift my confidence and raise my voice.
Our nation is opening the gates to the great Trojan horse, teeing off on soveriegn Saudi assets, wetting their appetites on our landscape as it transforms into hot, arid wasteland
Without question I’d love to let go of the wheel and coast through my sixties with an iced pitcher of espresso-infused martinis on my picnic table. However, “closure” is not an option. I know that those I hold close wish for me to move on, with the implication that I can pack away and swallow the key on twenty-two-years of fighting for my survival, my sanity, my children’s well-being, my husband’s legacy, my sense of value. Every day I’m opening to discern the expanding awe of how the perfect love that grew between David and I for two decades, continues to evolve in unexpected ways. In Dylan’s inciteful ways of solving problems and his proclivity for art and Edomae sushi. In the love that remains strong between his mother and I. In the way the unbroken voice that had always been hidden deep inside me, protected by the fortress I’d spent half-a-century building to protect the beaten down parts of me, is surfacing in a continuous unveiling.
Nineteen years ago, I was coerced under duress into signing an agreement that barred me, and all those whom share this tragedy and sought the elusive avowal of closure, from pursuing civil justice and appropriate restitution. The largest majority of us were young mothers raising children. Following a great persistence of widows and decedents in lifting these restrictions, the Department of Justice (DOJ) has issued judgements with the year 2039 etched in the terms, which feels more like a suggestion than an affirmation. For three years, I have been deadlocked by the Nassau County Surrogate’s Court, of my past residence, in my petitions to appropriate reparations issued by an act of Congress on behalf of David’s estate. My MDL attorneys arduously motion the DOJ and petition Congress to renounce extrajudicial killing of American nationals, expose truths redacted from 9/11 Commission reports, exact punitive measures, and appropriate reparations on behalf of my son and I. Consequently, the expanse of time that this wound has been open has widened the berth for serpentine profiteers in cashmere suits poised as attorney’s, congressional representatives, and corporate insurance conglomerates. Independent attorneys assemble satellite groups of 9/11-related individuals unlawfully seeking duplicate and exclusive judgements to seize assets based on the murder of my husband! This dissonance muddles and hurts the pursuit of justice and reparations for the families of those who were murdered and injured on that day, as the horizon recedes into the abyss! To date, I am sequestered to witness the unclosed trials of the few who are housed, fed, and administered health care, at a cost far greater than my “award”. To date, our nation is opening the gates to the great Trojan horse; teeing off on sovereign Saudi assets, wetting their appetites, as our landscape is transformed into hot, arid wasteland.
No prosecutions. No verity. No justice. No reparations.
Each year, the song of the sparrow dims as the ring in my ears grows louder. There are so many flashes in my field of vision, that most days, I don’t even know where my cursor is. Near the end of this composition, remains a broad caesura afore atonement for the murder of my husband and the subsequent death of my son. For this sacrilegious assault on my family there have been no prosecutions. No verity. No justice. No reparations.
For years I had felt stuck, choked by the scope of the 9/11 machine — the global terrorist organizations, the banks that hold deposits supporting terrorist activities, the foreign governments whose representatives and employees planned, trained, and carried out the attacks, the uncountable multidistrict litigations (MDLs), and the U.S. government protecting their secrets in sealed records under the guise that revealing the truth “threatens national security”. Really, the unremorseful mass murderers have already won; Fragment of right scapula, broken mother, fatherless sons, one death by suicide. I am their trophy. All of this, this, this, etc., punctuates the Islamic militant’s creed – that a “defiled” Islam must be purged of apostasy, with bloody sectarian killings. I am the bold-faced sentence of the crusade in Islamic jihad.
I just want to become someone I can live with.
But, despite the drag, I have been moving forward all along in my life. I strive to break the isolation of my northern Vermont shelter by travel to explore the beautiful landscapes and architecture of the world, taking daily walks with my border collie, keeping good company, and getting some fun, as Dave had wanted for us all. And oh yes, writing and sharing my stories. I may not always be graceful nor ever twirl with the verve of a young woman in a field of gold but, every day I dry my tears and strive to make peace with the 37-year-old who had to die in order for this 58-year-old to find freedom on the other side of my protective walls. I just want to become someone I can live with.
I accept the decree handed me by the Masters, as I continue to walk through the dark tunnels carrying the ballast of my load and loves in my backpack along the unknown path [ ] treading closer to the lucid acme of truth, transparency, accountability, and justice.
© 2023 by Deborah Garcia, all rights reserved
