On September 11, 2001, I was sitting in a temporary office at the company where I’d been working for the previous couple of years when someone sprinted down the hall yelling something about the World Trade Center. Like children following the Pied Piper, if instead the children were adults filled with urgency and fear, a group of colleagues followed, all heading towards the single TV in the 12th-floor lobby. There, we gathered around, watching the morning unfold in real time.
In my memory, many of us are standing with tears in our eyes, with our hands over mouths open in shock.
It was my first day back at work following my initial summer in California. I’d flown back to the east coast three days earlier and was already deep in plans to return to the farm where I’d learned so much about myself. I’d commuted to work that morning with my friend’s husband, someone I’d known since I was 16 years old. We’d joked and chatted like we always did.
At work, we returned to our desks, numb and staring, processing the fact that what we were seeing was moving from a horrific tragedy when the first plane struck to something much more sinister after the second plane arrived. Then, another sprinting colleague, this time to the clear opposite end of our floor, to the windows where we could see the Pentagon burning.
When I was a child, I used to envy the fact that my parents had memories of certain events that bonded their generation together: the moon landing, the day that Kennedy was shot, the Martin Luther King, Jr. assassination. I didn’t know it then, but what I was eager for was a sense of community, of shared experience. I didn’t want awful things to happen. But I wanted to be able to say that I knew where I was when something monumental occurred.
September 11 was that for me. It wasn’t the first – I also remember the Challenger explosion and the day of the Columbine shootings – but it was and is one of the most vivid.
A few hours later, when my friend and I drove home again, we were stunned and silent. The sunroof was open to a clear blue sky, a perfect September day, made eerie by the lack of passenger planes, made scary by the occasional fighter jet.
There are some things that you cannot unknow. The grief that comes with life, the bad people who appear, the ways we are tricked into believing one thing and then finding out we were completely wrong. I know where I was on that particular September 11th. And, of course, I wish I did not.
The Wandering Introvert 