Two cannon shots went off in town at 11 this morning. My heart stopped for a moment, as it did last night when I heard a plane coming in low over the city. But these shots were harmless, and after their resonating boom had died away, silence descended upon Brighton. It was a silence different from any other silence I’ve ever heard here; a heavy, deliberate human silence. Seagulls wheeled above the chimneys in an incongruously blue sky, and for three long minutes, their cries were the only sound to echo through the empty streets.

I turned on the television to hear Big Ben ring ponderously, and then watched the pictures from around Europe: people at the American embassy in London, at the European Parliament, at the Eiffel Tower, all of them with their heads bowed - but with their backs and shoulders straight and proud. I wished I could have been among them for those three minutes of silence. Since Tuesday, I’ve felt very far away from - everything, really. I’ve been craving human contact. I’ve been feeling the need to connect somehow to the country of my birth and to the city in which my mother and her mother and father were born.

Since Tuesday, I’ve been in a daze. My family and friends are all safe and unharmed. My only personal connection to what happened on Tuesday is that I am an American and I am a human being, and as such, I am… what? Stunned, appalled, horrified, shocked, disgusted, terrified, distraught… There are so many words, so many shades of meaning and conjured emotions - and they are nothing. In my incompetent hands, anyway, words seem useless. They don’t say what I want them to say. They can’t begin to convey how I feel. Like the fragile steel frame of the World Trade Center, they somehow can’t stand up to this onslaught. They crumble into nothing beneath the weight of so much fear and sorrow. They mean nothing and change nothing and just ring hollowly in a silence that is somehow still there, and that I think will be there for a long time to come.

Since Tuesday, buildings have been collapsing in my mind. The planes circle over New York, and buildings fall, again and again. I keep seeing it on television, and I keep seeing myself see it on television. I see myself on Tuesday, standing outside of a pub near St. Paul’s Cathedral, watching these planes, watching these buildings, feeling such a profound disbelief that I thought the entire world must have turned upside down.

We had been in the Tate Modern, laughing at the pretentious modern art. We didn’t know what was going on. We were just happy to finally get out of the gallery. But the day had turned grey, and though we were initially only joking about how the whole Tate Modern experience had left us feeling “alienated from society,” the oppressive building and the remote art really had cast a shadow over us.

We walked towards St. Paul’s, seeking warmth and humanity, needing something life-affirming. And as we walked, we saw that everyone was reading the evening edition of the paper. And we saw what was on front of the paper. We wound up outside the pub near St. Paul’s, where we stood and looked in at the television. I think that some part of me will always be standing there looking at that television, shaking, weeping, wondering what the hell was going on.

“Oh my God, oh my God, I can’t believe this. Did it collapse? Did you hear her say that? Did the World Trade Center collapse? Holy shit! I can’t believe this. The Pentagon? This can’t be real. I can’t believe this, I can’t believe this…"

I can’t believe this. I can’t work, and I can’t think straight. My thoughts just go around and around, like the seagulls, like the planes. When they alight upon something, it crumbles beneath them.

And yet… when I saw the pictures of the New Yorkers lined up along the side of the road, cheering on the rescue crews and firefighters, I wanted to throw my hands in the air along with them, cheer with them, wave a flag. I wanted to shout, “Yeah! That’ll show you, you bastards! You can’t break us! You won’t!"

And they won’t, I know they won’t. I pray they won’t. In the aftermath of this atrocity, I have seen more kindness and humanity in the past three days than I have seen in a very long time. I’ve seen people and countries pull together in a way that I wouldn’t have thought possible just a week ago. Maybe it won’t last. Maybe the voices pleading for tolerance and justice will be drowned out by the voices screaming for revenge and begging for more blood. Maybe the search for understanding and the struggle for cooperation will be thwarted by those who can’t or won’t differentiate between the terrorists and the innocent.

I can only hope that the humanity that was somehow lacking in the terrorists will not be lacking in those whose responsibility it now is to deal with this tragedy - namely, in all of the rest of us. I hope that pain and anger can be channeled into something that is constructive rather than destructive. Because since Tuesday, I think we’ve all seen more than enough blood and destruction to last a lifetime.