Sometimes on the anniversary of 9-11, I go back through the whole morning beginning at 8:45 when I woke up, when I answered the phone to hear my friend Jamie crying, and when I turned on the television. I remember calling my husband who knows I exaggerate who didn’t seem to believe me at first. Then, when Pfizer sent everyone home, he did. I called my dad who wasn’t working at the Pentagon that day (although he could have been). We watched the news the entire day. We put out an American flag. We worried over everyone we knew in New York City
What I think about today, however, is that overwhelming feeling of both awesome togetherness as a community and nation and horrific dread that the world would never be the same, that it was perhaps ending, that we were no longer safe. The love we all felt as we comforted both friends and strangers mixed with the horror and the fear. I learned a new feeling on September 11 that means all of these things. The images burned in my mind along with that feeling of communal strength that rises against fear. The contrast is as strong at that perfect bright blue sky that held the smoke and ashes.