Never Forget
11 Sep
They say that you always remember where you were during those important, those life-altering, moments in history.
I remember saying a prayer (yes, ME!) and lighting a little candle in my room when the Federal Building was bombed in Oklahoma City.
I remember working in an elementary school as the office assistant when word spread about the Columbine shootings.
While those two memories stick with me, no memory is burned in to my being like the morning of September 11, 2001.
I had just started law school months earlier and that morning I was awoken from my precious sleep by my phone ringing. It was about 6:30 or 7 a.m. PST and my mom was on the other end of the phone.
“Something big is happening. You need to turn on the television.”
That’s all I remember from the conversation. I immediately went to the living room in the apartment that I shared with a friend and turned on the news.
By that time the second plane had already hit and the chaos that was being captured was, and still is, mind-numbingly frightening. I immediately went in to my roommate’s room to wake her and her boyfriend.
See, my roommate at the time was finishing up her undergrad work, but had plans (and did eventually, I believe) join the Navy to go to medical school. But despite her devout patriotism and my repeated attempts to convince her that some really crazy shit was going down, she remained in bed that morning.
It’s something that, to this day, I still cannot comprehend.
Her boyfriend, a friend of mine, joined me on the couch and we watched, dumbstruck, as the buildings fell.
Me in my tee-shirt and underwear. Him in only his boxers.
But it didn’t matter.
For me, that is the visual that is burned so deeply in to my brain that I doubt it will ever go away. The innocence of it all. The pure shock and horror at what was unfolding in front of us that neither one of us gave a shit that we were sitting in our underwear together.
We were together. We were safe. And for that instance, that was all that mattered.
Because the world as we knew it was never going to be the same.
Song title: Never Forget by Fleetwood Mac
I was on my way to work, I was listening to Pat Cashman, and at first I thought it was a bad joke. Horrified to realize it wasn’t, I had to spend the next 9 hours only getting bits and pieces of news, because dammit, the old people needed their meds.
After I got home that day, I remember being terrified to leave the house, send J to school (kindergarten), do anything for fear that something else would happen.
The world was never the same, but I was so proud of how Americans came together and told those terrorists to fuck off.
Odd thing…I have a memory burned into my head that day and it wasn’t from the terror happening on the east coast…instead it was being caught in a rampage shootout in Sumner that day.
I had just been in a car accident a few months before where I was hit head-on at 50mph. I had left my job in film acquisitions, gave up my Seattle apt & lifestyle, and moved back in with my mom to rocoup. That morning I had gotten up around 11 am only to find my siblings and mom in front of the tv. They of course were so glued no one came to tell me what was going on.
Of course the events set off panic attacks from my PTSD but luckily I had an appt with my therapist that day. I drove to downtown Sumner early because I was not sure how long it would take me to get there with all of my panic attacks. While sitting in my car, on the phone with my sister, I heard gunshots start to ring off.
Windows were shattered near me and I had to climb down on the floor of my car. When the gunfire moved a street down I ran into the back of a local business (where oddly there were people shopping/eating with no idea what was going on). I went out the front of the store to access what was going on and the Sumner police had surrounded two guys that had been shooting up the city with automatic weapons. They went down to the ground and were aprehended.
Oddly enough…any other day that would have been top story…
The guys were apparently thinking that the attacks on 9/11 were a sign from the Devil that the end was here and that they were told to kill. Of course…they were from the town of Roy.
It was a heartbreaking and odd day that truly gave me enough to talk about in therapy for a while