never forget?

everyone says "never forget", especially on the 10th anniversary. but all i can think is, how could i possibly?

i don't just think of this day on its anniversary each year, or when the horrifying images are thrust in my face. i remember all. the. time. i know i said this last year, but this year i feel it more than ever- people who weren't there, don't understand. they can't understand the raw emotion that's still there, that brings tears instantly when i allow myself to think of it.

of course everyone in the country, in the world, remembers where they were when they found out. but for us who were there, we feel it. i still feel it.

walking back in from gym class with former best friend mary by my side, jess harlow running down the stairs saying two planes crashed into the world trade center. confusion, didn't understand what she meant. walking into the school, chaos. people everywhere. it was the middle of the period still, but nobody was in classrooms. students, teachers, everyone in the hallway, some running, some screaming, desperately dialing phones and sobbing when their parents or spouses weren't answering. this was before cell phones were allowed in school, but nobody was in trouble. people running out the doors, to their cars, speeding away. jared widman crying, screaming, because his dad wasn't answering. we all crowded into what i think was the teacher's lounge, because it had a tv. shoulder to shoulder, there must have been 300 people in that little room, and we watched the towers crumble. live. several people, teachers, collapsed, sobbing, because their loved ones were actually IN THERE. and then i just left, sort of floated out of the building in a daze. the middle of the school day, but nobody was stopping us. i got in my car, turned on the silent radio (all the stations were broadcast from the city), and just drove for hours.

i grew up in connecticut. what a lot of people don't realize is that the southwestern part of connecticut is basically just a series of new york suburbs - almost everyone, at least in my town, had parents who worked in manhattan. it was an affluent town, as most in that area are, and we were good kids, studious young adults who were bred to strive for success. teachers didn't need to be strict because we were strict to ourselves. {of course, there were teenage parties with teenage things, but i wouldn't really know the details since i never attended.} i had a small, closely knit group of friends, but most of the time i just wanted to be home with my family, or secluded in my room.

my dad had lost his job that year. previously, he was always working. always in manhattan. we went into the city almost every weekend, shopping, dinner, whatever. i LOVE new york. and i'll be honest, when he lost his job, the cutting back of expenses annoyed me. i was a teenager, in an affluent community, and i wanted what my friends had, and it frustrated me that i couldn't. i wasn't spoiled, my parents never spoiled us, and i did work for my own money. but still. frustrated. that day, while everyone else was frantically trying to talk to their parents, i was thankful for the first time in a year that my dad had lost his job, because i knew he wasn't in the city. he was at home with my mom, safe.

my sisters and i have never really talked about it until today. i've always felt like i was the only one in my family who felt it that deeply. they were younger, and sheltered from it. we- the high schoolers- were mature. we were, essentially, adults. the teachers didn't shelter us from anything, students and teachers experienced it together. kelly was in middle school. they called 2 girls down to the office, one at a time, before they announced to the school what had happened. one of the girls lost their father, the other survived. the students weren't allowed to watch tv until later, after the towers had already collapsed. (i watched it live.) kelly's former best friend alex thought her mother was in the towers working that day. she was frantically trying to call her mother, sobbing because she wasn't answering. i'm pretty sure the middle school was let out early, but i don't remember. i know they were in school longest, because most of the high school left on their own.

i thought dev was too little to remember it; i always think of her as a 3 year old in connecticut. but she wasn't, she was in first grade, and she remembers too. they called the kids down to the office, one by one, and all the parents were there waiting for them. mom and dad were both there for her, because dad was home, and she was mad because she couldn't have a play date with her best friend kylie. she remembers walking through the parking lot and seeing kylie and her mom, and kylie's mom was crying because her husband worked in the towers. (he survived.) dev was holding dad's hand, and mom hugged kylie's mom. they went home and dev pouted on the couch, still mad that she couldn't play with kylie and too young to understand what was going on.

my parents had spent the morning at the beach in westport, watching the smoke across long island sound. my mom noticed then that a diamond was missing from her wedding ring. (foreshadowing...)

my cousin john was in the second tower. he and his father worked on one of the top floors, and had gone down to get breakfast. he had to have therapy to get over the nightmares of running from the cloud of smoke.

i don't remember going home, or what happened the rest of the day. i think that i went to my room and watched the news. i've never been the type of person to want other people in a crisis; i've always preferred to work my feelings out on my own.

the next day, i went to my usual babysitting job. michelle told me that her cousin meredith hadn't yet heard from her husband, peter. he worked in the towers. they never did find his body. about 3 weeks later, they held a memorial service for him. i was there to watch the little kids. i'd been to several funerals in my life, but this was by far one of the saddest. he had 2 little girls, taylor and caley, and little 3 year old caley came up to me and said "i'm gonna be a princess for halloween. my sister is gonna be a witch, and my daddy is a ghost."

i will never, ever forget that.

today, i made the mistake of reading justin's status, which basically said that 9/11 doesn't matter because only 3000 people died. i am seething with rage. he sat there that day, in his isolated little desert town, a million miles from the chaos and devastation, and watched it on tv like a spectator sport. ignorant, arrogant bastard. how dare he belittle our emotions?

september 11th, 2001, changed me. i couldn't possibly forget.