This is what Charlotte writes.

03.26.08

burning ice
exploding on my tongue
I open my eyes
and am
blinded by the darkness
My ears are aching from the silence.
Here, I am there
And you are everywhere
and nowhere to be found
I can feel the edges of the mint container
in my pocket and hold it in my palm
This helps me feel less alone.
I close my eyes again, and
can almost taste their relief
As they stop trying to see.
When I open them, I
am again blinded, this time by the light
Bright white is all around me and
the ice from the mint flows
through my entire body.
I shiver so hard I’m sweating, teeth chattering
You are not here, either, though I can feel you no less strongly
I close my eyes again and I can tell by the way that the light disappears from in front of my eyelids that the darkness comes back. I’m afraid to open them again, afraid to face the reality of still being lost without you.
The silence presses down on me. Suffocating. Deafening. But then– I realize that it’s no longer silence. Sound is cascading at me from all sides, crashing and pounding and tossing me in its surf. I am frozen, terrified. My thoughts are nearly obliterated by the noise, leaving one sentence hanging in my mind: “I don’t want to be alone,” and I can feel it in every atom of my being. And then, your hand (and I know that it is yours, even here in oblivion, I know that it is yours) slides in my pocket, quizzically freeing the mint box from my grasp, and you lace your fingers in mine. Finally, I find the courage to open my eyes, to turn my head to where you stand beside me, and then look down, down into the valley, to where the bombs are exploding our old world, illuminating our new one with intermittent flashes of searingly beautiful light.