Something happens right before disaster strikes that will have you remembering the strangest details. I’m sitting in a Chinese restaurant in Christchurch, NZ, about to have lunch.
The clock above the kitchen window says 12:49, February 22nd 2011, and my stomach feels too empty. Being a poor student is a mix of living off 20 cent potato fritters, instant noodles, and the occasional splurge on a restaurant outing.
The conversation at our table was dry at best; it wasn’t like this all the time, but when you spend too much time together, the chat goes through peaks and troughs. The booth next to us has a good tempo. I tilt my head slightly and try to pick up any of the words.
They’re talking about the Heart Attack Grill in America. If you aren’t familiar with it, it’s a famous gimmick restaurant with a unique selling point to try to kill you with the enormity of its meals. You’re weighed in on arrival, given a wheelchair to ensure not a single calorie more than necessary is burned inside, and you simply shovel food inside your mouth like a kind of human foie gras factory. I smile as an animated storyteller lists more unbelievable details to an enthusiastic audience who can’t quite believe what they hear.
What’s funny? my friend asks.
The moment the earthquake struck
At that moment, a stack of plates flies across the room. How did that happen?
I look out the window. When did it start raining? What looks like heavy rain is fragments of concrete falling from the sky.
We make a beeline for the door (and the concrete shower), scramble out of the restaurant and find ourselves in the middle of the street with everyone else who made the same choice.
The problem with navigating danger is you only ever think you have two options. Without danger, you have as many options as your mind can conjure. A mind operating in fear sees only in or out. Right or left. Fight or flight.
But as someone told me when I recounted the events of the earthquake, it is one of those situations where it doesn’t matter which choice you make; when you’re running into a wall of bullets, if there’s a bullet with your name on it, it is going to find you.
We walked, eyes wide, not looking ahead but looking up, anticipating what might fall next. A man with a ladder runs past me. Another man with a rock is smashing into a car window, yelling he’s getting the carjack. How do these people know what to do? Did I miss the dress rehearsal for this?
Out of habit, I rest a filter in the corner of my mouth and start rolling a cigarette. A woman with her arms hugging her cardigan closer to her chest walks up to me and asks if I can roll her one, too. She confesses she hasn’t smoked in over 20 years but tells me she could really use one right now.
I keep rolling cigarettes in shock, checking if anyone around me needs one, too.
It is humbling to imagine what you’ll do in an emergency, only to find out that what you actually do is quite different. Rolling cigarettes wasn’t how I imagined myself navigating a natural disaster, that’s for sure. At least it kept my hands busy; my nails would be gnawed down to the bone by now.
More people arrive at the square as the ground beneath us rolls again, and the right side of the Cathedral comes crashing down before our eyes. The earth rumbles beneath us as giant stone blocks hit the ground.
A woman walks past us quickly, desperately trying to get her wedding ring off her finger as it quickly swells up from an injury.
Stories are entering from the side streets and are being passed from person to person straight into the heart of the square, travelling from ear to mouth, each word rippling through every person standing in the middle of the Square.
…And they kept rippling through the community over the following few months as most places shut down, aftershocks continued, emergency crews worked to retrieve bodies and power cuts became standard throughout the day. New Zealand’s only national tank was seen rolling through the streets of Christchurch as rumours spread that those with a sleight of hand were looking to take full advantage of ‘windowless shopping’.
These are the details I remember of the day Christchurch fell.
On the morning of February 23rd, the people of Christchurch woke up in a different city without ever having left. The streets were the same, but they felt unfamiliar and unsteady. The skyline had shifted, entire buildings missing like teeth knocked loose in a fight. The air smelled of dust and despair. The places where people had gathered just the day before—cafés, offices, bus stops—were left in pieces across the pavement.
The Christchurch of yesterday had existed, and then, in a matter of seconds, it hadn’t.
The thing about travelling and returning to a place you love is that you expect to find the same city waiting for you as the one you left behind. However, as someone who has come and gone and come and gone again, I can tell you that you’ll never find the same city twice, not even the same city.
Those places exist only in our memory as soon as we walk away.
Not every city changes as violently as Christchurch did overnight, but they will move, breathe, and undergo growing pains. Moods shift, faces change and the edges start to look different from how you remember. We hold onto places in our minds and when we revisit them often feel a pang of disappointment because they can fall short of our expectations.
Ultimately, it is less about the city you want to return to but rather the person you once were that you're looking for.