story877.xml

story877.xml

born-digital

story

yes

no

2002-07-10

As a third year college student in all typicality, I had hit the snooze button on my alarm clock several times, unknowingly drifting in and out of sleep through the last innocent morning in America. I finally got out of bed at around 10:00 and began straigntening my apartment here and there--with a full schedule and a part-time job, this morning was the only free time I'd have to clean before my mother's arrival the following day. I recall that the portable phone was resting on the open kitchen counter; I don't remember it ringing or saying "hello," but I do remember the tone of my father's voice when he told me to turn on the television.

One of the towers had already fallen and I questioned if it had ever been there at all because I was afraid of that reality. I watched the second tower there, wounded against the clear sky. I would later site the irony in 100% visibility on the day when no one wanted to be looking down from the top of the WTC. I watched the tower fall on live television; it was like watching a lit fuse. Never had I felt so completely helpless and far away from the great city; I envisioned a million Americans standing at our televisions holding our hands out as if to say, "No," as we would had we watched a castle of playing cards fall to the floor beneath us after hours of building such a masterpiece. It was the most critical moment in my life--being able to do nothing, standing open-mouthed and holding a garbage bag of my college-girl trash.

From then on I think America finally became interested in The News.

Trying to make sense of this now, still in the same apartment in Chapel Hill and approaching my senior year, I wonder about the unity we have now as America contrasted with the unity we had before the attacks. I think about the American condition on the night of September 10th versus that condition on the night of September 12th--or even tonight for that matter. We may have been happy with our lives for the most part, petty social problems surrounding us, living in an ignorant bliss. Life was good and I was in college and the weather and the boys and the shopping in Chapel Hill were SO far out of this world that I was completely blind to problems outside those of my solitary life. The morning of September 11th transformed me from that person living in the far-away Chapel Hill to a person living in a bleeding America.

We have gone on with our lives--those of us college-girls who lost no one personally in the tragedy--we go to bars and we make good grades and we keep buying the same perfume we wore before the 11th. Looking up and reading the stories of Carolina alumni who lost their lives in 9/11 makes me want to empathize a situation I cannot, but I try to imagine myself as the in-love fiance of one man killed on that day out of simply wanting to feel more in common with those who are grieving. As a single and unattatched young woman, I imagine feeling a love so great for someone and then losing him to something of this magnitude; I think about the last time he smiled at me or the vacation we just shared: it was beautiful and romantic and we were happy, having no idea that soon one of us would be taken away and the other one left here with the pain of memory and survival.

So I believe that the three most unifying days between America and my life in Chapel Hill were the 10th, 11th and 12th of September. Together to some extent we shared a quiet night, the last innocent morning, and the beginning of a future that would want us to feel.