I’ve never written about September 11. I looked back at 5+ years of archives to confirm, but nope, never. It’s not that I’ve forgotten, or that I somehow don’t care. I just never quite felt it was my story to tell. I was lucky, I didn’t lose anyone I loved.
I was 22, barely more than a year out of college. It was probably my third week in a brand new job, I was a guidance counselor in a suburban high school. It was the beginning of the year, so I was up to my neck in schedule changes in a curriculum I didn’t even yet grasp. I remember the secretary, Judy, telling me as I walked out to get another student.
“A plane crashed into the World Trade Center.”
Oh, how terrible, I thought. Some local pilot must have lost control of his little four-seater airplane.
I’m sure it wasn’t long before the reality trickled in. I don’t know if it was the school’s paltry internet connection or a worldwide server overload, but I couldn’t get to any of my news websites. I don’t think I had a radio in my office at that time, and I hadn’t yet been introduced to NPR, anyways. Nobody had smartphones, nobody I knew sent text messages. I panicked and tried to get a hold of my dad, the constant business traveler who always flies United in and out of New York and Washington. Thankfully, he was in Ohio that day.
Emails started to come through. Sorority sisters in New York were all accounted for, some worked in other WTC buildings, most were thankfully not that far downtown. After the initial “I’m OK,” they sent descriptions of the eerie silence that night, everything covered in ash and dust and paper blowing by.
The school nurse’s son had an interview in one of the towers that morning. He overslept his alarm and missed it.
I spent an hour with one of my most annoying students, shifting around her gym class so she could have the right study hall. In disbelief that I was wasting my time on something so trivial on a day like that day.
School got out around 2 in the afternoon, and I headed straight for M’s apartment. We had been dating less than a year, and were just coming off of a rough summer. Late riser that he is, the attacks had already happened by the time he got up in the morning. He never went to work that day. We sat together on the couch all afternoon, horrified by the TV but having a hard time turning it off. I cried myself to sleep on his thin, crappy futon bed, unable to erase the thought of people jumping from the 100th floor.
Even though everyone I knew and loved was safe and accounted for, I don’t think anyone came away from that day unaffected. Here we are, 10 years later. 10 years, three addresses, three jobs, seven years of marriage, and three kids later. I haven’t been able to stop reading the feature stories on Boston.com. I’ve been in a touchy mood, simultaneously extra annoyed by the kids and desperate to hold them next to me.
However distant our connection, we all have a story of that day. So this is mine. I don’t want it to seem as though I have forgotten. I couldn’t forget if I wanted to. Could you? I had to write about it, probably just this once and not again.
I’m going to try to avoid the TV coverage tomorrow. I’m just about all remember-ed out. I’m not ready to talk about it with my kids, who are already hitting that weird phase of being strangely obsessed with death and bad guys. I can’t explain it to them at four years old. Instead, we’re having their postponed birthday party. Gymnastics and bounce houses and cake. Life marches on.
