story4365.xml

story4365.xml

born-digital

story

yes

no

2002-09-11

when i was younger i lived in New jersey and visited manhattan island often. though it's been years since, i still feel that i left a piece of who i was in that city the day i left. on september 11th it was like a piece of me was being torn down and as i watched in horror as the event unfolded on my beautiful city i started to think of all the people i knew who were gone from me forever.
the images of the towers falling are ingrained into my memory and they are something i will never let go of. no matter how many times someone tells me to move on, or that i should be thankful that i don't live in the states right now and that i have so much hin Canada, it doesn't matter to me: i am a New Yorker at heart.
the first few days i walked around in a blur, thinking of nothing else but the events. at my school no one seemed to be affected like that... i guess i couldn't blame them, they didn't have the connections i did.
i rememeber finding out and hearing the other people talk of war. all i could think of was that my father was in that wreckage and i was never going to see him again. later on i found out his flight had been cancelled and that he was going down to new york later that week.
all the employees of my father's company had survived, but i remember those first days after when we waited to see who had been lost to us. i remember coming home on 9/11 and seeing my fatehr with tears in his eyes, i have never seen him cry before and as he tried so hard not to, i found myself comforted by his strength. that day he told me two things. the first was " katrina, i want you to remember what you did today because someday someone will ask you where you were on September 11th" i didn't know it then but those words turned out to be truer that i had believed. the second thing he said was "people i know are dead today. i'm not sure who they are yet, but people i know are dead." sadly the second statement proved true in the following days ahead.
after all the funerals, i lived my life according to what was, and not to what is. and that's how it was until i began to see my beautiful city of New York raise from it's own ashes. i began to see that the terrorists hadn't killed what made New York such a beautiful place, and even through the worst of times and the strongest attacks, New York was stronger and that i was stronger than to live my life through my own shadows.

so God Blessed America. and remember, you do not live in America, America lives in you.