Almost exactly a year on from that horrible day, something quite unexpected happened.
I think the day was a Tuesday, and the previous Friday I had been made redundant from my job. Quite a disappointment as it was a job that I loved, but sometimes these things just happen. As such I was sitting back in my cosy little unit on this particular morning, getting on with updating my resume to hit the job trail.
Tapping away at the keys, I heard that little tone that says a new email had arrived. I didn’t look at it straight away as I was working my way through a thought and didn’t want to stop typing. In fact, I completely forgot about it for some hours.
I had made and drunk several coffees, had lunch, and even had a nice hot shower – before sitting back down and doing some more work on my resume. Before long I heard that “new mail” tone once again.
This time I looked straight away – and it was just a follow up email from one of the recruiters I was talking to in the hope of getting back to work. I read it, and answered it.
It was then I noticed the email that had arrived hours ago and to this point had completely forgotten about. A first glance it looked like a piece of spam email and I was just about to delete it when I took a second glance – and that’s when something caught my eye.
There was no full name listed as the sender – just the email address. Which started with an “m”, followed by two further initials that matched Maddie’s initials. I blinked and looked again, as that combination of letters was a common thread in my head, not just because they matched Maddie’s initials, but because I often used her three initials in computer passwords.
They were embedded in my head almost every day.
So I took a closer look, and without reading the content jumped straight to the sign off at the bottom which just said “Love, Maddie”.
I was pretty depressed that I had lost my job a few days earlier, but I forgot all about that and started reading her email. It was short, but made my day.
Probably my week, almost certainly my month, and absolutely my year.
It had been almost 8 years since I had seen her last – that fleeting moment on the road on Boxing Day. I’d also heard absolutely nothing about where she was, or what she was doing. I just ached to hear anything from her or about her for that entire time.
Her email quickly spoke about how she’d been away overseas, and that she had just come back to Australia because she really felt it was time to be back close to her family again after “going through some stuff.”
There was one mystery though – how did she find my email address? I wasn’t in the habit of using it publicly – (I had another throw away email address for signing up to websites and the like) – but this one was my “private” email address that almost nobody knew.
To this day I don’t know who gave it to her – a few mutual friends knew it, so I’m guessing it was one of them, but that question was never answered, and didn’t even come up.
Frankly, I didn’t care – Maddie had come looking for me and she had found me!
I replied back quickly, probably gushing with a massive smile, and before long the emails were bouncing backwards and forwards. It wasn’t a lot more than small talk to be honest, but she was coming to town the next week to do her own job hunting since getting back to Australia and she asked if I wanted to catch up for a coffee and a chat.
Are you kidding? Hell yes – just tell me where and when!
We quickly picked a time and a place, and it was entered proudly into my calendar – “Coffee Date with Maddie”.
The email chain carried on for the rest of the week, a couple of emails a day generally. I asked about what she’d been doing, and how married life was.
“I never got married, it fell apart pretty quickly,” was her response.
Hmm.
“I took off overseas to get away from the bullshit, and I’ve only just decided to come home. I had the shit scared out of me on September 11th last year.”
“What happened?” I asked.
“I was visiting New York with a friend because neither of us had ever been. September 11th was going to be our last day, and we’d left our luggage at the hotel after checking out to do a final few hours of sightseeing before flying out – and we thought the World Trade Center observation deck might be somewhere to get a few good photos.”
I’m reading the email completely wide eyed at this point.
“We jumped on a subway train to head towards the WTC, but the train stopped a couple of stops away from there, and everyone was told to get off because the trains were shutting down because of an incident at the WTC.”
“We emerged at street level and could see all the smoke spewing out of the building we were about to visit. We were literally just a few minutes from getting there. We saw the second plane hit, and we were terrified, like most people.”
“We thought we were far enough away, just a few blocks north, so we just stopped and watched in amazement of what we were seeing, and then the first tower to collapse came down. The cloud of dust started rushing between the buildings, and we just turned and ran. Ran and ran and ran back to our hotel. I don’t think we even looked back once.”
I think I left my body reading this – understanding how close Maddie came to perhaps being truly caught up in all that horror.
And then I remembered how I had felt while watching the events live that night.
“Gee, I hope Maddie is okay!” I thought on the night.
I had no idea that she was even overseas again, let alone in the US, let alone in New York.
Yet I had asked myself that night if she was okay, while watching it all unfold on television.
I replied to her email, still shaking. All I wanted to do was be close to her, and stay close to her always. I wanted to hold her and look after her after what she had been through.
“Maddie, can I tell you my story from that night?”