where i was on 9/11

i read a couple blog posts tonight where the women described where they were on 9/11. 

i suppose that sometime in the future i will forget some of the details of that day, 

so i suppose i'll recant it here...

                                            not that it's anything particularly remarkable.  

                                                        at least not to me right now. 

what better place than electronic form, right?  

9/11/01

I was sitting in my humanities class 2nd hour, 

looking up something for a research project in the computer lab.

there weren't many of us in that class (all seniors, I think), 

and our teacher pretty much let us do what we wanted. 

someone said, 

                "Hey...a plane went into one of the Twin Towers." 

I tried finding it on a news site, but

so many sites were bogged down that I couldn't get more than a 

small snap shot of the burning building.  

Did I think it was a terrorist attack?  I couldn't find anything on that.

The picture was pretty small, so it seemed like a fire coming out of a window, 

not an inferno caused by a jet airliner with thousands of gallons of gas aboard. 

We went back to class for a bit and then headed to 3rd hour - choir.

People were starting to buzz about this, but with the 

small little picture stuck in my head and a moment's lapse in 

my typically over-serious view on the world, I jokingly and moronically said to a friend, 

"We're all gonna die!!!"

That friend...it might have been Audrey...said to me,

"No, Laura, it's really bad."

Having the guilt complex that I possess, I went to choir wondering what exactly was going on.

And there we sat,

somewhere between 70 and 80 of us,

almost silent (which almost never happened),

watching

watching

watching.  

We had missed seeing the planes hit the buildings in real time.

I'm thankful for that: small town classmates who've 

                                           known each other since we were in kindergarten 

                                                      do not hold back their emotions, 

and every instance of murmurred horror and whispered confusion would have 

turned into shouts of shock and cries filled with flood-like tears. 

Everyone stared as the buildings burned, then crumbled, then collapsed. 

We watched the TV all day,

talked about what might happen,

silenced our friends when Bush came on to speak,

and,

except for 8th period, when my prob&stats teacher made us learn (I was mad)

wondered if anything would be the same again. 

Nothing really was the same again, 

and that's the case for any major event in one's life.

An important factor about this date, among many other factors,

is that it affected all of us. 

Not just one town, one state, or one country,

but - the world. 

More about things that happened after 9/11 later.