It’s hard to believe it has been ten years already. I remember it like it was yesterday: coming into my high school class to a CNN broadcast. It was ironic to have the TV on in the first place, but I took my regular seat. There was a building with smoke billowing out of it and I remember thinking, “What country is that cause it looks surprisingly like New York?” No one in the class spoke, excluding the hallway chatter before the bell rang. The teacher stood speechless, glued to the TV. She wrote our assignment on the board, clearly not paying any attention to her crooked writing while remaining attentive to the TV screen. We all wrote down our assignment in our usual programmed way. I saw the second plane hit in real time. I wondered why anyone would run a drill like this. Didn’t they know how much fear they could instill. Then it hit me – our country was under attack.

Today is a mixed-bag of feelings with the shock of the 10 year anniversary of 9-11. It’s a mixture of sadness and yet the odd normalcy of the happiness of a beginning a new day. It’s that eerie haunting oddity of the tragedy… in the face of the new life and rebirth of today. In so many ways it still feels surreal, even though I have visited ground zero and seen the footage. It still feels like a bad movie sometimes, this disconnect from New York since we are “so far away.” And yet now that my horizons have broadened, New York doesn’t feel as far away as it used to feel. In other ways it feels dangerously close – too close.

I’m not sure I ever got over the shock of 9-11. I know that I am blessed to not have to personally grieve for the direct loss of family or friends due to the tragedy. Last night I listened to the recorded audio transpondings amid airports and the cockpits of the 4 hijacked planes. Maybe it’s because I was so young – merely a Sophomore in high school that made the whole thing feel oddly small for a while. My world felt smaller compared to the things I know and understand today. I couldn’t even drive, people, so seriously my world consisted of a town-radius. It was odd how I felt the fear of “they’re on our soil” and yet the safety of “we’re not nearby anything governmental.” I didn’t know Wright-Patt Air force Base was in Dayton.

And then I remember seeing the footage of what looked like New York City was on fire after the Towers fell…

It is still quite overwhelming. It brings tears to my eyes at times, now that I know more to the magnitude.

My eyes have been slowly opened to parts of the breadth of the tragedy and I have become slightly less shell-shocked. I wonder if there were any children on the planes. I wonder how terrifying it would be to look up from your desk nearby New York’s tallest buildings and see your neighboring building “on fire” or witness the second plane hit. I can’t imagine the wives and husbands and Mothers sitting by the phone praying for the “I’m okay” phone call that never came.

My heart goes out to the families of the victims of 9-11. I don’t really have words to say, but I offer my silence and my prayers in honor and remembrance of September 11, 2001.