The Towers

In the 8th grade, my English teacher shared a story of the day JFK was shot. She said she remembered every detail of that day, where she was in each moment and the exact things she felt.  She looked back on it as a defining moment of her youth.

I remember vividly when she said that because I couldn’t understand why a moment like that could have such a personal effect on her life. The trauma I had experienced in my own life up to that point was very personal: my mom’s mental illness, my father’s absence. Why and how could I be so affected by something like that, I wondered.

That same year when she shared that story, the school shooting at Columbine happened, the first school shooting of its kind that signaled a seismic shift in our culture’s conversation about guns ( a conversation that is still sadly ongoing).

The year after that was the Elian Gonzalez saga, the one where the Cuban boy was snatched out of his Florida familys’ hands by the American government and returned to Cuba.

A couple years prior was Princess Diana’s death, a tragedy illustrating the destructive power of celebrity. 

I remember being greatly affected by each of these events in different ways. So much so, that I cried about them and wrote in my journal about how they helped shape my understanding of the world. But still, I had never had that JFK moment my teacher had shared. A moment seared into my brain. A moment that would not only change how I saw the world but how the world saw itself.

A few years later 9/11 happened.

Each moment of that morning plays like a scene from a movie. When I waited outside my astronomy class as someone ran up to a friend and I to tell us her mom worked at the World Trade Center and she was afraid. When I walked down the crowded hallway and every single conversation was a variation of “Did you hear about the plane crash?”. When I walked out to gym class and saw smoke in the air. When I joined the crowd gathered outside of my school’s tv studio where multiple screens replayed the horror of what was happening. When I left home on a bus having not been able to reach my mom.

When I got home I looked outside my window at the surreal scene of smoke from the fallen towers, breathed in the cloudy grey air from all around me, sat in front of the TV helplessly watching the image of the planes hitting the towers on a loop and people jumping from the highest floors to their inevitable deaths, and recounted with my mom her story of never making it downtown that day. It felt like the world was ending.

I was a junior in high school but in that moment I thought of my 8th grade teacher.

I finally understood how she felt.

Because I felt it too.