From inside my bubble
For the first time ever, I know and feel that being blown up in a terrorist attack is not something that happens to other people.
When rubbish bins blew up on a crowded Oxford Street several years ago, when the Canary Warf tower exploded, when bombs went off in Paris, even when trains were derailing all over the place, I don’t think I ever believed that my little bubble of a life could ever be burst. Mayhem and fear and destruction happened outside my sphere. Things blew up, things were fixed; then the whole thing took on an abstract dimension. Like a piece of history; history is not supposed to be moving, is it? So many more pressing news every day, we must move on, and we forget.
Is it because I so recently experienced that violent death can and will strike close to home – all the violence, all this promise of chaos and slaughter suddenly feels very real to me. I am grateful to not have to commute by tube every day. I count the people I know who do; I count those who don’t. I am glad that my mother lives in an unlikely place – unlikely to be targeted, that is. I am thinking of limiting my trips into central London, especially by tube, especially at rush hour; won’t they try to strike when the most people can be killed, workers, shoppers, symbols of the western economy? I make lists. Fear lists. I have finally come to understand that death doesn’t just happen to other people.