Nine years ago today, I was still settling into my first year of high school. Making friends, learning my way around the building, establishing myself as a young adult. I remember that my teachers looked strange that day, they would leave the class and came back, they seemed on edge, and they stayed away from the TV in each room.
My math teacher (whom I already wasn't fond of at this point), was handed a sheet of paper, and she stood at the head of the class, and preceded to read.
The World Trade Center had been hit by a pair of passenger planes. I don't remember if she mentioned the pentagon or Pennsylvania, or if they'd been hit yet. She wasn't supposed to tell us this. She was only supposed to tell us that because of 'unforeseen events', our school would be closing within 3 hours. She didn't even tell us which trade center had been hit. I understand that most adults, and maybe a good deal of kids, would have assumed New York. But as a 14 year old girl with a mother who worked at the trade center in downtown Baltimore, thats where my thoughts went. I spent that class, and the next, in a state of panic, and no one took the time to calm me down. My final class I remember that day, was fundamentals of art. Taught by the teacher that would become my favorite, throughout my high school career. I was freaking out by this point, and I sat down at my desk. Somehow or another, the kid across from me read my mood and, after determining why I was so upset, assured me that my mother was safe, the planes were in New York. That kid is now one of my best friends, and he's still a great person to go talk to.
One of the first things that made me love my art teacher. She treated us as adults. She came into the room, wheeling a TV. And she told us, we needed to witness this, because in a few years we'd be adults, and people needed to start acting that way. The images I saw are burned into the minds of most of the world, and it seemed unreal to see. Replays of the planes colliding with the buildings came every few moments, and crowd of screaming New Yorkers made it all sink in as a real thing. Those shots of a mass of people, clutching strangers and sobbing, all covered in the dust of an icon. Streaks of tears through the dirt on their cheeks, men and women collapsed on the curb, unable to support themselves in the face of such shock and tragedy. A macabre shot of a man jumping from an upper window of one of the towers became the face of my nightmares. This didn't even look like America anymore. And without the last nine years of war to envision, I couldn't readily think of what it DID look like.
I had a friend back then, Jon, who was a great support to me, one of the few people from my much younger years I still talked to. He'd gone on a trip to New York to visit his family, and his aunt had sent him to visit the trade center's observation deck. The deck opened too late for him to be up there when the plane hit, and he's never been listed on any of the lists of the dead, but we never saw him again. Jon was his mother's favorite child, a hard working, loving boy that would never have just up and left his life. In my heart, he's a victim of that tragedy, and my personal reminder of that heinous day.
I can't believe nine years has passed, and how different the world is because of that day. I can't believe how much I'VE changed in those nine years. How cynical that day made me, how much trust I lost in humanity. I've never blamed Islam for the attack, terrorists come in all shapes and sizes, but it really drilled into me that humanity is not one big circle of love. There are dangerous, deadly levels of hate in our world. That day, while disillusioning me, also made me work to bring less violence and hate into the world.
