The Explosion of Pandora’s Box

Therapy is meant to be a safe place. Maybe the safest a lot of people have ever known. It is a place that absorbs all the scary and big stuff until you’re ready to slowly walk back out with the parts you need. That is a lot of laughs, tears, shame, frustration, and fear.

The idea of a therapist’s office feels like a container for emotion. Yes, you could say the therapist her/himself is the container, but if they are going to compartmentalize enough to not let it all weigh them down, they’re going to have to leave some of it behind at the office each night.

In my imagination, it all seeps into the fibers of the carpets, the nooks and crannies between the floorboards, and clings to the walls until they are eventually sealed forever by a fresh coat of paint.

With some rough math, I figure I have spent around 275 hours on my therapist’s couch.

Using the same fuzzy math from the total, I guess I spent around 150 hours in the first of the two offices my therapist has had since I started seeing her.

It is the room that held the massive vulnerability of that first session. Eight months later, I brought in a list of reasons I suspected OCD. While I hoped to disappear into the couch, she confirmed my fears, which ultimately gave me so much relief.

It was there where I began to process Rowan’s birth, ad nauseam. It was the first place Rowan ever went other than the hospital and home. I sat with him tucked into a ring sling, swaying him when he stirred and nursing him when he was hungry.

Many evenings, I get stuck in evening traffic at the light beside what used to be her office.  Even now, two years since I’ve stepped foot inside, it makes me think about whatever we have talked about most recently.

This is making me sound like a creepy stalker. But really, that light is red with ungodly frequency. I bet a lot of the locals reading this have spent time stopped at that stoplight at the corner of Duke and Morgan St.

You also know where I’m going with this.

On Wednesday, I was in my office writing an email when the electricity went out. It came back on a few minutes later and I figured a random transformer had blown, or someone had hit a pole. Because my office is at least halfway underground, I did not feel the building shake as the lights went out. The sensory shock of suddenly being in the complete dark in my windowless office masked whatever sound others heard.

Around 9:30 am on Wednesday, a contractor hit a gas line in front of the Kaffeinate coffee shop on Duke St – Right next door to Main St Clinical Associates.

Firefighters cleared the coffee shop of everyone but the owner.

They told the people in surrounding businesses to stay away from that part of the roads, but not to evacuate yet.

In the meantime, gas had been pouring out and up and around the area for more than 30 minutes. It was not a small leak, either.

At 10:06 am some small spark of something caught the attention of all that natural gas.

And as natural gas naturally does, it exploded.

That was the moment, one mile away, when our power went out and the earth shook. The concussion of gas meeting fire was felt miles beyond. When I wandered into the hallway, everyone was gathered around furiously scrolling through their phones.

Gas leak

Duke Street

Explosion

Fire

I actually walked a dozen or so steps beyond before the words sank into my brain. I stopped.

WRAL says it was near the corner of Duke Street and Morgan.

My brain pulled up a map of Duke Street and saw my therapist’s old office. It also saw the Durham School of the Arts.

Haven’t you been outside? You can see smoke.

I walked straight out the door and looked North where a storm cloud of smoke billowed through the blue sky. The hum of TV news helicopters replaced any bird song.

I pulled up my phone and went to the local news sites. The next few minutes is a blur of watching the sky and reading local news alerts. It wasn’t until I saw the footage from those helicopters that I felt dizzy.

An entire building was mostly… gone. What remained was disappearing quickly in a four-alarm fire.

“I’ve never seen anything like it before” – Eyewitness Robin Jarvi says after the building collapsed in downtown Durham https://t.co/mtapaZIb6y pic.twitter.com/YzvvPPGlHX

— ABC11 EyewitnessNews (@ABC11_WTVD) April 10, 2019

The brown brick building just to the right of the explosion is my therapist’s old office. Her office window is near the middle.

At that point, many of us watching assumed dozens of people had just blinked out of existence. Our students had an exam at 10:30 and frequently studied at Kaffeinate beforehand– were any of them there? We scrambled to account for everyone.

Even as reports came in that the coffee shop had been evacuated it still seemed likely that many had died. They had not closed off the road in time, so there would have been cars driving down Duke St. Maybe there were lines of cars sitting at that stoplight.

Somehow, the only person who died was the owner of the coffee shop, but many others were injured, and so many more affected. Windows broke three blocks away. Many businesses were closed for days. A favorite Mexican restaurant is closed for the foreseeable future. Eight Duke employees were among those injured.

A block away, there are cameras set up to watch over the “can opener bridge” aka “the truck-eating bridge” aka “11Foot8.” Usually it captures trucks getting their tops sheered off after ignoring the low clearance signs. Last week, it captured the force of the blast.

Here is a quick Google Map I made of the buildings listed as damaged by the News and Observer:

There has been a sense of could-have-been for a lot of us this past week, as we imagine all of the possibilities. All the time we have spent in traffic feet from the explosion. Hours spent in the coffee shop. Lunchtime walks around the block. Parking cars in the lot out front. 150 hours spent on a therapist’s couch.

I kept seeing the windows of the clinic on TV. I could see her window, blown in. The offices closer to the blast were full of debris. I imagined all of those years of peoples’ deepest secrets, absorbed into the structure.  I pictured Pandora’s box of the best and worst humanity has to offer, scattered into a blast of air and fire.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the current therapists and clients of that clinic. From a client point of view, I know the peculiar sort of pain that worrying about a therapist causes (fucking pregnancy, man), but I can only imagine how it would feel to have this safest of spaces literally blown up.

It took me days to be able to name the achy feelings that slithered through my stomach and heart every time I thought of the explosion: grief and love. The shock waves have not been only literal, they have spread throughout our city, hitting each of us differently. But the grief and love seems to be somewhat universal. The sorrow is, of course, acute for those who were directly impacted, but for the rest of this town there is this lingering feeling of heartache. It is watching a loved one suffer in pain, injured and scared, and all you want to do is fix it somehow.

What this city has taught me over the last week is that even when you are helpless to heal the wound, the love runs deep enough to keep us going. By the time the flames had been extinguished, Facebook was already full of residents asking how they could help. Where could they donate? What supplies were needed?

I saw how the community came together, rallying to feed emergency personnel and those displaced by the blast. Mavericks Smokehouse and Taproom, unable to open to the public because gas services were shut off to the entire area, was able to serve as a coordination point. Nothing brings people together like a disaster because, I suspect, on the whole people inherently seek to ease pain rather than cause it.

I’ve watched the $50,000 GoFundMe for the family of the coffee shop owner, Kong Lee, swell to nearly $150,000 dollars. A more general GoFundMe has raised over $25,000 to help with any other community and individual needs that arise.

There have been rallying cries to support downtown businesses. They’ve lost days of revenue, and with the general unease settling over that part of town, they will likely lose more. Businesses not physically affected have been doing what they can to help their neighbors. I went to Scrap Exchange for birthday party supplies and they were asking people to round their purchase up to the nearest dollar, with the extra going to recovery from the blast.

Every morning, when I drive down Gregson St to work and pass the ruins of businesses and lives, there is sadness, but also so much adoration for this city I adopted as home nearly ten years ago.

When Pandora opened that box, hope was what remained.

I fucking love this town.