Miss

I was a student at a small international school in the middle of Tokyo. On March 11, my mom was driving me to school. We had moved houses within Tokyo just a year ago, and when I suddenly realised that I didn't know where our family would meet up in case of an earthquake. So I asked, and my mom and I spent the whole drive talking and deciding going to the park near our house. Then at 2:46 PM, the Tohoku Earthquake happens. Final period of the day, and our whole grade was hosting a speaker that worked with disaster refugees. When the first tremblings hit, we were discussing what we would pack in emergencies. This whole day freaks me out, from beginning to end. When we had left the house that morning, my sister had left a big crystal vase full of birthday flowers for my mom, on the very edge of a table in the foyer. On our way home, we were sure it had been smashed. But to my amazement, it was still there. It looked like it had barely budged a centimeter. It was literally right on the edge and it hadn't fallen over. The classroom only had desks for 17 students, but for the speaker, we stuffed 51 kids into one room. This meant that during the shaking, there were about three kids to every desk. My best friend and I were the only ones to have a desk to ourselves, as we sat way in the back of the room. At a certain point we found some blank pages in the opening of the desks. We scrounged up a pencil, and then my friend began to write. She wrote the announcements as they happened, the warnings, and what was happening in general. One day I want to find those pages again. My friend had them for sure, even she lost track of them a while ago. I really want to find and read those pages again.