literature

The day was September 11th, 2001...

Deviation Actions

xdeathbybananax's avatar
Published:
351 Views

Literature Text

I remember I was sitting in my elementary math class. An announcement came over the intercom. I didn't pay attention to it. Normally it was just a kid getting called down to the office for one reason or another.
I quickly realized this announcement must have been different. It became eerily quiet. Then a girl started crying. The whole room became much too loud. All over, kids were screaming and crying. The teacher quieted us down so we could hear the next announcement. We were all being sent home. We hadn't even been in school for an hour.
I still didn't know what was going on. Why were we being sent home? Why was everyone crying?
I got home and we sat in front of the television and we watched as the second plane came in, striking the tower as the other one smoldered.
I was eleven and I couldn't comprehend what was happening. How could this be happening? What was going on? My family and I had just been on top of that tower not two months ago. Why was this happening?
We watched it come down. Live. On television. I felt like I was in a dream. This couldn't be happening.
I pretended like nothing had changed. In my small world. Nothing had changed.
A lot of people didn't come to school the next day. Or even the next week. I found out later that they had all lost someone in one of those towers. They were attending funerals. Over half the kids in my school knew someone who died that day. I was one of the few left to support those who did.
We were eleven years old. We were attending funerals of loved ones who were killed in a terrorist attack. We were trying to comfort our grief stricken friends. We were eleven years old. What eleven year old knows how to handle something on that massive of a scale? How are we suppose to know how to deal with something that's being called the greatest national tragedy of our time? We were eleven.

I went on pretending. Every year I found the "moment of silence" on September 11th to be annoying. I had classwork I needed to do. I don't have time for this. I would stand in silence anyway, hands folded or on my heart, eyes closed, head down.
I was hiding from what I couldn't handle. I had never emotionally dealt with it. I had never grieved. I had never cried. I just pushed it away and refused to think about it. I didn't even watch anything about it on television. I hated that all the channels were playing 9/11 related stories and shows for the month surrounding it. I didn't want anything to do with it. It's been like this for ten years since that day.

This year, 2011, that all changed.
I watched the shows. All of them. I stayed up late to make sure I didn't miss any. I don't know why, but I couldn't stop watching. And I couldn't stop crying. The dam had finally broken. At twenty-one years of age, I could finally deal with what had happened.
I had been to New York City many many times after July 15, 2001, when I visited the WTC. I intentionally stayed in Midtown Manhattan. I pretended Lower Manhattan didn't exist.
This year, when Osama Bin Laden was finally taken down and construction on the WTC Memorial was well underway, I specifically planned a trip to the place I'd forced myself to forget about.
On November 5th, 2011, I visited the WTC Memorial site. Through the construction tarps, I could see the huge footprints left by the towers and the memorial towers rising around them. They're not completed by any means, but it filled me with such pride to see us getting back up from the sucker punch we were dealt all those years ago.
I found a spot outside the fence where all I could see what a great big hole in the skyline. I stood there and just stared. I realized that I stood near this exact spot about ten and a half years ago with two massive buildings in front of me. The realization hit me then.
They're really gone.
I stood there. And I cried.
In the middle of the sidewalk. In the middle of the crowd. I cried. Ten years of hurt, hatred, fear, confusion, and grief streamed down my face as silent as the air around the Memorial.

I am no longer afraid of thinking about September 11th. I no longer feign annoyance at the moments of silence or the shows. In fact, I encourage them. I no longer fear feeling for this event. If I could say one thing to myself back then, I would have simply said, "It might not look like it now, but we're all going to get through this. It's going to be okay."
It's all going to be okay.
I submitted my story to the Official 9/11 Memorial Museum yesterday. If you have a story and/or photographs you would like to share with them, go to their website here -> [link] and click "Add Your Story"

The picture is of my cousin Tonia and myself atop 1 World Trade Center on July 15th, 2001... less than two months before they came down.
© 2011 - 2024 xdeathbybananax
Comments3
Join the community to add your comment. Already a deviant? Log In
DaikiTheWolfTIC's avatar
It must have been harder than it sounds to finaly relise what had happen affter so long rejecting it