Four days ago marked 14 years since the attack on our nation.
I was 11 years old on September 11, 2001. I remember getting ready for school, getting on the school bus, like any other day. My friend, Briana, and I sat in the back of the bus and she mentioned that a plane had crashed into a tall building in New York. I had no idea what she was talking about and I wondered what happened that made the pilot do that, what had gone wrong with the plane.
We got to school - I was in the 6th grade, Mrs. Schmitz's class - and I remember things were not normal that day. We went into reading time and the school was on lock down. They announced this over the intercom. Shortly after, students started being picked up by their parents. I rode the bus home early, walked into the door, and both my parents and my grandmother sat in front of the TV not speaking. I sat down on the floor. I remember the news showing the video of the first plane and then the second over and over. I saw the people running covered in ash and debris, the man jumping from one of the top floors to his death, firefighters, police, reporters... A blur of images still singed into my brain.
Every year when September 11th comes, I get very emotional, my heart is so sad, and being only eleven at the time, I couldn't figure out why I have always been so impacted. The babies that were born that year are now older than I was when this happened, I live clear across the country from where this happened, and I lost no loved ones during the attacks, but I am extremely impacted nonetheless.
I believe that those of us who are now between 20-26 have a unique perspective on this tragedy. I think it is unique because those older than us and those younger than us simply cannot understand how we see all of this. Here is what I mean:
As an 11-year-old, there was still an innocence to me... I watched the footage with a childlike understanding of what was going on. My mother decided not to tell me about what was going on before I went to school, but once I got there and I came home and saw what was going on, it was no longer hidden and I really tried to understand the best that my 11-year-old mind could.
For months, there was media coverage, a war broke out in Iraq, American flags were raised at businesses and homes, and I grew up in a world so different than the first eleven years I had lived. Adults were no more worried, there was more tension, less unity in some aspects...
Every year, when the anniversary arrives, and the images are once again flashed on my TV screen, flags are lowered, my heart is once again broken. I fight between the memory of my childhood fears and my feeble attempt at understanding, and my adult understanding of today. We were in this intriguing age that was just old enough, but still young enough and we saw the world from both sides.
