Remembering September 11

I don't remember what I did on September 10, 2001.
But I will never forget September 11.

On September 11, 2001 I was sitting at my desk doing mundane every day tasks when our secretary walked in my office and said "a small plane just hit the World Trade Center."

I admit, for a split second I had to think "World Trade Center? Oh yeah, in New York City." After a few more minutes of talking about why someone would do that, she walked out of my office and I kept working. Then my mom called and said something bad was happening in New York City and we should turn on the TV at the office.

I gathered our small staff and told them we needed to turn on a television to see what was happening. Within minutes of tuning in to ABC News, the second plane hit.

Oh my God.

Did you just see that?

Did that plane just hit the other tower?

There were five of us sitting in a conference room and no one could believe what we were watching.

What the hell was going on?

The office phone rang again.
It was my mom.
Did you see that?
Did you see that plane hit the tower?
Yes. I saw it.
I could not process what was happening.

No one knew what to do.
And so, we tried to continue our workday.
We all went back upstairs to our offices and tried to work.

The phones were eerily silent that day.

I called Kevin and my sister and my mom.
I tried to find news online.
The Internet was not working that day.
All the news sites were too busy.

We kept a small black and white television on all day long.
We watched in horror as the towers fell.
We stood in shocked silence as news came in about The Pentagon and Shanksville.

How could this be happening to America?
What did we do to deserve this amount of tragedy?

No one did much work that day.
We spent most of the day huddled around that black and white TV, watching the never-ending tragedy unfold in NYC, Washington and Pennsylvania.

That night after work, I went to Kevin's house. We had only been dating for two months at the time. We spent most of the evening sitting on the couch watching the news in silence. It was unimaginable. America had been attacked by terrorists. Nothing made sense.

I still remember how eerily silent it was that night as I walked to my car.
There were no sounds in the sky.
All commercial flights had been grounded.
The silence was deafening.

And now, 10 years later, a memorial stands in the footprints of the towers.
And a new World Trade Center is rising.

But we will never be the way we were on September 10, 2001.

The world as we knew it was forever changed on September 11, 2001.

We will never forget.