22 March is my sister’s birthday. Now, it’s something else too.

I was still getting ready to leave for work this morning when the news came in first about the bombs at Brussels airport – where I’d been at 11pm the previous night – and then at Maelbeek metro station, just a short distance from my flat. Jo begged me to stay at home, and that’s probably what I should have done, but I didn’t. I walked in to work along eerily normal streets where the people I see every day looked like they always look, or perhaps just a little bemused and quiet. Police cars with men wearing balaclavas tear past, sirens wailing. But that’s another thing we see fairly often in my part of town, given the regular Summits. I get to the office and once I’m at my desk it feels fairly normal. I check Twitter and Facebook. Friends all over the world are messaging me to ask if I’m OK. I feel like a fraud. I’m in the middle of this thing but basically I’m just fine, unaffected. And then I start to cry. I can’t explain it. Fifteen people are dead at the metro station I can see out of my window. People are dead at the airport I flew into yesterday night. It could so very, very easily have been me. But it wasn’t. I feel guilt. I feel disconnection. I feel very strange. I dread finding out who has in fact been killed, and injured. This is a small town, this will touch us all.

Nearly fifteen years ago, days after 9/11, I was in a large crowd gathered on rue de la Loi outside the Berlaymont and the Justus Lipsius to show solidarity and sympathy with America. Fifteen years later, I look out of my window at the same view. There are barricades, I count at least a dozen armed police, and I can see four soldiers in full body armour carrying assault rifles. If Osama Bin Laden could see this he would say to himself “mission accomplished”.