Untitled (9/11)

A month or so ago I completed a medical survey that asked several questions about my background, specifically my childhood. There were the typical questions about diet and exercise, but also ones that asked about any trauma that may have occurred before I reached adulthood. 

Now, I was fortunate to have grown up in a stable two-parent household in upper-middle-class suburbia. My childhood was happy, my needs met. The most traumatic thing I can remember happening before I reached the age of reason was when I got some ants in my pants that then crawled all the way into my underwear (not fun). My life was fairly peaceful and free from worry.

So when I came to the question of whether I had ever witnessed someone die in a violent way, I was prepared to click the 'no' circle and move on. Sure, I had seen the aftermath of some bad accidents on the highway, seen the cluster of ambulances and police cars on the scene, but I had never seen someone loaded onto a gurney, bruised and bloodied or worse.

But then I thought of 9/11.

It was one of the first classes of the day. Social studies with Mr. Sundstrom. We had only been back in school for three or four days and were at work on our first group project of the year. I sat with three of my classmates and we began to work on the assignment. Heads rose once in a while to look towards the classroom door where our teacher stood, halfway in and halfway out. He disappeared into the corridor for a few minutes to speak with some of the other teachers. Several of us shared looks and shrugged before returning to our work. When he came back in the room he turned on the TV and stood with furrowed brows and crossed arms. I remember the remote still dangling from his hand as he stood transfixed.

The rest of us caught on fairly quickly and turned our attention to the screen.

I don't remember much talking. We were all listening, trying to pick up on every little detail the newscasters were sharing while watching live footage of the Twin Towers engulfed in enormous clouds of black smoke. 

Everything after that is a blur of images and sound bites. Other planes, other attacks. Tiny figures hanging out of windows, waving shirts and jackets. Fire trucks, helicopters, and swarms of police officers and soldiers. People falling, people jumping. Screaming, sirens, debris hitting the ground, bodies hitting the ground. The South Tower collapses. Then the North Tower.

"Oh my God," was the collective reaction. "They're gone. The Twin Towers are gone. All those people. They're gone."

For days afterwards my classmates and I worried about further attacks. We worried about planes crashing into our brick-and-mortar middle school.

"Why would terrorists target some dumb middle school?" we told ourselves. We knew it was irrational, the fear we felt, but we felt it just the same. And that was what the terrorists had wanted, wasn't it? For us to be afraid, even where we should have felt safe.

Eventually those fears subsided. The emergency need for blood donations waned. George W. Bush and Rudy Giuliani were no longer gracing the front pages of every periodical. But those images stayed, the ones burned into my mind, our minds - the people hanging out of the broken windows while smoke poured out above them, the people falling and jumping, the people covered with dust and ash. 

I was thirteen-years-old on September 11, 2001. I had acne. I hadn't gotten braces yet, hadn't had my first kiss. I still secretly played with Barbies. I had never heard of Osama bin Laden. The only reason I knew that Baghdad was the capital of Iraq was because I had had to memorize all of the countries and their capitals for school the previous year. 

It's a day that I, quite honestly, try not to think about too much, which always seemed odd to me. Sure, the whole event hit close to home - after all, two of the planes later hijacked took off from Logan Airport - but none of my loved ones were directly affected. I didn't lose anyone. I didn't even know anyone second-hand who had lost someone.

But I did lose something that day: my innocence.

Suddenly the world seemed much smaller, and all at once much larger. My affluent town, my commonwealth was a tiny pinprick on the map of the world, but evil had found its way here. Evil had infiltrated the very same airport my family used to go to Disney World. The towers I had photographed only months earlier with my disposal camera while touring NYC were gone. And thousands and thousands of souls, gone on to the next life.

Twenty years later I'm only beginning to understand how deeply that day impacted me. Twenty years later I cried myself to sleep thinking of all those people, how frightened they must have been. Twenty years later it is still so raw. I'm back at my desk in my eighth grade social studies class, watching thousands of people die on live TV. 

I clicked the 'yes' on that survey.