where was i when…?

Just looking over my diary, I realized this is the first time I’ve ever written on September 11th. Now that I think of it, I may have written on this date in 2004, but I believe that was one of the entries I lost in the hacker attacks. In any case, I thought I’d give my brief “where were you when…?”

In the span of time between 8:45am and 9:45am on that day, the first three planes had crashed into each of the towers, and the Pentagon. During the first two crashes, I was in first period, geometry. By the third, I was in second period, chemistry, where I still was when the fourth and final plane crashed in the middle of Pennsylvania. At the time, I was blissfully ignorant of all four incidents.

I went to lunch after second period, at about 11:00a.m. Approximately 15 minutes later, my friend Ashley came into the cafeteria, late from an orthodontist appointment. “A plane hit the World Trade Center.” she told me. “What??” It took me a few minutes to connect the World Trade Center with what I, up until that moment, had only ever referred to as the Twin Towers. “Yup,” she said, picking her sandwich up off of her lunch tray, and beginning to munch it. “Someone flew a plane right into it. They’re saying it’s a terrorist attack. I heard it on the radio when I was at the dentist.” I was still in awe and couldn’t believe it. I went to my third period class, Choir, wondering if it was going to be acknowledged at all by my teachers. In choir it was business as usual, and then finally, at 1pm, I got to go to my last class. Humanites.

By that time, everything important that had happened, had already happened. The crashes were over, a portion of the Pentagon had collapsed, and both towers had fallen. And yet, for the full 90 minutes of the class, we got to watch it happen over and over and over again on the news. I didn’t realize at the time that the towers were already dust, so when I saw the female reporter literally running away from the cascading debris of the tower, as the entire screen turned brown with dust, I thought I was watching it as it was actually happening.

It wasn’t until later that evening that I remembered that my Uncle Michael regularly worked in the World Trade Center. He lived in White Plains, NY at the time, and due to phone lines being down, we were unable to contact him. I remember being in tears for hours just because I didn’t know anything.

We were fortunate in that he’d cancelled all of his appointments that day in order to go furniture shopping with his wife for their new house in Connecticut. But I’ll never forget that feeling. The feeling of not knowing is one of the worst in the world.

And there you have it. Where were you?

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