I can’t believe it has been 25 years!
I had just graduated from college in May of 2001 and was still looking for a job. That morning, I was asleep at my parents’ house when my girlfriend at the time, now my wife, called to ask if I had heard anything about a plane crashing into a building. I told her no and immediately turned on the TV.
Smoke was pouring out of the upper floors of the North Tower. I watched as the news anchors tried to make sense of what had just happened. Was it a small plane? A terrible accident? Nobody knew yet.
Then, a little while later, a second plane came in low and hit the South Tower.
That is when everything changed. The first one could have been an accident. The second one meant we were under attack. That was the feeling, collectively, from what I remember. I think the country’s innocence, as we knew it, ended that morning.
My wife was working at a local mall and could not watch the news, but the rumors were rolling in. I tried to keep her posted as best I could, and it got scarier as the hours went by. Everyone was panicking. Someone even called in a bomb threat to the mall, and the whole place was evacuated. I remember being on the phone with her and hearing people crying behind her. One of her coworkers was hysterical, saying over and over that she just needed to go home.
Later, the horror kept coming when a third plane hit the Pentagon. Then, a fourth plane went down in a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, after the passengers fought back. Both towers collapsed, one after the other.
All I saw was mayhem on the news, and I could not peel myself away from it. I was not looking forward to any of it, but I felt like I had to watch. Young me felt I had been handed the job of keeping everyone informed, and I took it seriously. As if I were the guardian of the day’s events, and if I walked away, we would miss something. Of course, that is far from reality, but it was the only thing I felt I could do.
I watched for hours on end until I finally got so fatigued with seeing those planes hit those towers over and over that I had to stop. I turned the television off and forced myself to just sit in silence and process my thoughts.
Twenty-five years later, I still cannot watch that footage without feeling like I am a young man again, standing in my bedroom at my parents’ house with the remote in my hand.
Where were you on September 11, 2001? What do you remember like it was yesterday?
#September11 #NeverForget