Body Movin'

As I sat down to arrange my new desk on the top floor of our building I felt the ground shake. My body tensed up and I looked around at everyone and everything. I have trauma. Every time a truck drives by, or the air conditioner turns on, I feel the feeling. My stomach turns and I worry. This all started on 4, April 2002. My first earthquake. I was sitting in a small apartment in San Salvador, Barrio Las Palmas when it hit. I thought it was just a truck driving by, but actually it was a small earthquake by the time it hit us, no damage was done to property or people, but I would never be the same. The more these small earthquakes, or tremors, hit the more tense I would get. Sometimes jumping out of the bed in the middle of the night to find cover. Little by little the feeling of a truck driving by turned into the thought that this could be the next big one, a destroying force on El Salvadors landscape. Twice in early 2001 devestating earthquakes hit El Salvador, and hearing about these only made me more aware. Now, as trucks drive by my office I get those same feelings, hoping, praying that one day they will come full circle and I will once again be disinterested to the point of ignorance.