story11686.xml

story11686.xml

born-digital

story

yes

no

2005-08-04

I had just turned 19 that summer. I was sleeping in that day because I wasn't scheduled to be into work until the afternoon. My mother was out of work on disability and had a tendency to wake up at the crack of dawn. For about an hour, the phone was ringing like crazy. I kept waking up mad wondering why someone could be calling this early in the morning in the middle of the week. I finally got out of bed and went downstairs to see what was going on and that's when my mother told me to look at the TV. At first I didn't believe it. I thought she was watching some movie. I asked her what it was and she told me that someone flew a plane into the World Trade Center. I still didn't believe it. Being that it was just the beginning of the "post 9/11 world", I automatically shot out a snide remark about how only an idiot can fly a plane into a building that big. "How do you not see it?" I said. And as I said it, the second plane flew into building 1. After that I was quiet. "Terrorism, they think" my mother said. Until that very second, I had never in my life thought about what terrorism actually was. To me, and every other person in my generation, terrorism was something that happened in third world countries. In school we were taught that "there will never be a battle fought on American soil, not in this day and age.". In 10 minutes everything I had ever learned, believed in and known was relinquished from reality. Here I am, almost 4 years later and I'm crying as I write this. The goosebumps all over my body and the chills going up and down my spine haven't eased the slightest. My stomach churns when I see pictures, my heart stops momentarily every time I hear a plane over head (and I do mean EVERY TIME!). I'm four years older than I was then, and none the wiser. I still don't understand this "terrorism", not that anyone in their right mind should. I'm still relearning life. The "new" way things are. nothing is taken for granted, and nothing goes unappreciated. My heart aches just as much as it did that day, the images are fresh in my mind and the tears flow just as freely. Us New Yorkers have a new bond, not one we brag and boast of but none the less, we all feel "it". "It" is different to each one of us, but yet we understand completely about the other's. Everyone seems a bit nicer, a bit more compassionate and a bit stronger. It seems like everyone has that same wrinkle on their forehead, that same frown-line. 50 years from now, it'll be me and my friends left. The only ones who will remember the "pre 9/11 life". The way things were.