This too shall pass

I was in my twenties, reckless, in love and convinced that nothing bad could happen to me or anyone I loved. Terrorist attacks were things that happened elsewhere, to other peopleIn December 1996, when a bomb planted by Armed Islamic Group of Algeria (GIA) exploded in the Port Royal metro station, I had just moved to Paris. The police, carrying guns, and armored vehicles in Saint Michel, the touristic area near the Notre Dame, along with security cordons on pedestrian streets and ID checks by police became part of daily life rather quickly. 

I was unmoved: armed men in uniforms asking for ID cards were nothing out of ordinary for a girl who grew up in Turkey in the 1980s, where you had to show your student card to the gendarmes every day before entering the university campus. It was just one more thing to slow down life - no less irritating than my bad French, the arrogance of Parisian waiters and the technical difficulties of that pre-internet era in sending my weekly column "Paris Panorama" (the forefather of Erospolis) to the Daily News.

After all, I was in my twenties, reckless, in love and convinced that nothing bad could happen to me or anyone I loved. Terrorist attacks were things that happened elsewhere, to other people. Certainly not to people who were young, bright, happy, adored and deserved to live happily ever after, forever.

Twenty years later, I fully realize the utter stupidity/innocence/magnanimity/self-absorption of this thought and how the 21st century taught us cruelly that nowhere was safe: New York, Istanbul, Mumbai, London, Moscow, Paris-Charlie Hebdo, Ankara, Paris again...And in many other cities, much less mediatized; other cities in geographies where terrorist attacks do not even make it to the top...