I hope that reading my writing makes you feel like I've just given you a hug. If it doesn't, e-mail me, and I'll have to give you one in person.

I was 13. It was nine years ago but how much longer does it already feel, groaning, freighted memory, that undeniable sense of collective history lapping at our ankles? I was in eighth grade and was beginning to wear dark nail polish; I had had my first kiss just a few weeks prior, my first sip of whiskey would come a few weeks after. It isn’t true that we didn’t understand what it meant, that we were too young to grasp the importance. We knew everything would be different by the small gestures of anxiety we caught in the unguarded reactions of adults: the timbre of the office aid’s voice as she tilted her mouth to tell our Ancient Civilizations teacher, the clacking sound the media cart made when they rolled the TV in so that we could watch the smoke billowing, spewing. That night my Dad’s face was weary and there was an exhausted, wound-up energy in his voice. “Everyone will remember where they were today, just like we all did when JFK got shot,” he said. I was 13 but I understood then the importance of remembering.

How many of us were afraid of flying before that day? Less than are now, I’m sure of it. The school didn’t send us home early, but parents started showing up in the hallways and taking their kids home without even notifying the school secretary. All of the kids whose parents worked in New York City got called to the office, and when I walked by I saw them huddled in shaking masses, their sorrowful bodies melting into each other, cell phones glued to their palms. By the end of the day, though school was never technically called off, it was so quiet it felt like a Sunday morning.

It was a Tuesday, though. Such a random day to unleash a ploy that would change the global landscape so dramatically. Nothing ever happened on Tuesdays–it wasn’t even a good TV night. That day was also my Mom’s birthday. I used to think that having your birthday fall on Christmas would be awful, but now I see that having to feign celebration while everyone else in the country mourns is actually much worse. That night, not knowing whether the appropriate action would be to forget her birthday or celebrate as if nothing had happened, we got ice cream and ate it guiltily on the benches outside. We hadn’t processed it yet, hadn’t yet heard of anyone we’d known personally who had died, didn’t know of the wars it would cause. It had only been ten hours. It was so quiet at the ice cream shop. I was 13 and what I remember most devastatingly is the quiet. No one laughed or joked or even talked about what had happened. There was a sense of communion and camaraderie in that silence. No one said anything at all.

At home that night we watched the footage over and over again. My dad looked like he had just eaten something rotten, his skin sallow and gooey like a snail with no shell. My mom thanked us for the ice cream and went to bed unusually early. I peeked in and saw she’d fallen asleep with a book across her chest. Afterwards I couldn’t sleep. I dreamt of planes crashing into my house, my school. “How do we recover from something like this?” I kept thinking. I understood that the world would be a different place, but I didn’t know how it would be different. I was 13. The next year, my parents would get divorced; a few years later, a boy no one ever suspected would point an AK-47 at my father in the hallway of my high school. These were the events that shook my life, the historically meaningless ones, the ones that didn’t impact anyone but the people closest to me. But then there was this, something that could, for once, be legitimately defined as ‘catastrophic.’ I guess that’s why I remember the sound the TV cart made, the quietness at the ice cream shop, even the flavor of ice cream I ate that night (cookie dough).

We rarely know life-changing events when we experience them, don’t recognize them as having an impact until long after we’ve had time to process them. I was 13, but I understood that this meant something. I saved the September 12th issue of the front page of both the New York Times and the Philadelphia Inquirer, packed them away in my memory box with bottle caps and hand-written notes from boys who thought they loved me. They’re still there, somewhere at the bottom. You’d find them if you dug through the box thoroughly enough.

Leave a Reply