REPERCUSSIONS part 1

terrorism and tourism

The calamity that comes is never the one we had prepared ourselves for. – Mark Twain, Letter to Olivia Clemens, August 16, 1896

There are things that are so hard to write about that I don’t know which end to grab. I have a difficult time merging my emotional memories with the facts of the story. Do I tell the story from the emotional side or as a hotel owner analyzing how to deal with what’s happening around me? Parts of this segment were written as they happened; serious events that needed to be captured in black and white so as to remember the details. I know I have more to add to this section, writing about it alongside the 2 years of Covid confinement and isolation and facing the consequences of both as a business owner. Please comment and let me know what you think; your thoughts, ideas, and opinions will help me write this.

November 14, 2015. A morning I will never forget. I woke up at quarter past five, as I usually do, yet with the first hint of a headache and a sore throat, only wanting a hot cup of coffee. I grabbed my phone and stumbled into the bathroom in the dark so as not to wake Jean-Pierre, fumbling to turn off the alarm before it had a chance to go off. I then, as I do every morning, tapped the icon that would pull up my emails, the emails that had come to me during the night as I slept. The first acts of my daily routine. Yet this morning, my screen was flooded with emails, one mention on Facebook after the other in quick succession, each tag coming to me via email, my box inundated with notifications and alarmed private messages inexplicably begging for news of my own safety sliding down the face of my phone in blue and white.   

“What’s going on?” I thought, the oddest things rushing through my sleepy brain. And I touched the first one to see what was going on.