Remembering 9/11
Today someone's heart is still broken in a way that I cannot comprehend. I haven’t really let this day affect me in the last nine years – maybe on the first year that followed but not so much the years in between. I believe the coverage for this anniversary started well over two weeks ago, and people have been asking, “where were you when?” I turned on the television this morning and quickly turned it off. I went to buy the Sunday paper and I turned it face down. When I went to read my favorite columnist in our local paper, even she had something to say about today. I thought to myself let me write down the imprint on my memory before I read anyone else’s. That is what brought me here today.
I have something I wrote on that day just to record how I felt. Much of today will probably be frantically searching through computer files, and old notebooks trying to find it – I fear that it may be trapped on a floppy disk. I have no significant story tell, no personal losses and I don’t know anyone that was there.
I was at work at the time and the first person I heard tell the news said it in a way that I thought a crop plane had flown into a building in New York City. That’s the way I took it and I went on about my work. Then someone turned on the television in the break room and we got the real story. As I type this my eyes are watering as I recall the horror I felt watching the buildings collapse. I can’t remember what else we knew at that moment. I don’t know if someone had already called it a terrorist attack. I can’t remember how much longer we stayed at work before they let us all go home.
I wasn’t in a big city by a long shot but we worked in a “tall” building downtown and everybody just wanted to go home. On a normal day of commuting traffic it would take 45 to 55 minutes to get home. That day it seemed to take 30 minutes just to get out of the parking garage because everybody was leaving at the same time. The whole downtown was going home. I cried a little on the way home – just because.
My husband was out of town at the time. So I was going home to be alone. Once I got there I turned on the television and sat there for hours in my work clothes, without moving. I only remember talking to my mom and my husband. He would have to fly home in a few days. Until I find what I actually wrote that day my significant memory is how alone I felt, the uncertainty of what was going to happen next, and what did this all mean? And in the words of Forrest Gump, “That’s all I have to say about that.”
Sporadically short,
Update:
I found my thoughts from 9/11/2001. I had moved it from floppy to a CD in June of 2003.
9-11-01 4:19 pm
Today marks the biggest day in history in my lifetime. There have been other great disasters and catastrophes but none like this. Today the World Trade centers in New York were hit and destroyed by American airlines undoubtedly hijacked and flown by terrorists also committing suicide. The first tower was hit at 8:42 this morning. The second tower was hit 18 minutes later. Later we learned that two more flights were hijacked, one hitting The Pentagon in Washington and another attempting to fly into Camp David (which is a rumor at this time). The whole nation is in mourning. Practically all businesses are closed, and my job let us go sometime around noon today. I have been watching the news ever since. Everyone is in shock. Everybody wanted to go home and be with their families. It just so happens that Jay flew out yesterday to go on vacation in Louisiana. Had it have been today, his flight may have been grounded and he would be stranded somewhere. There are so many repercussions from this incident. I just thought about people who may not have been directly involved in either of the site crashes who may have been waiting on organs being donated to them being flown in on airplanes. This is so unreal and when something like today happens you don’t really know what to say. I just thought as this is history in the making that I should write a journal entry.
