Flashback: 9/11/01

I was 5 when the twin towers fell, I had just started first grade. My grandparents were living with us at the time because they had just sold their house and were about to move to Florida full time.

I remember my teacher talk to the class, we sat on the carpet and she sat on the big orange chair that faced it. We were sitting in the way we would while she read us a story, but she wasn't about to read us a story. She was about to tell us of something we could not fathom. She started talking "Don't talk to other kids about what I am about to tell you I do not know if their teachers have talk to them yet..." At this point I knew something was wrong, this wasn't a tone my teacher had ever used before, something really bad had happened. She continued to tell us about the event of that morning but I did not grasp what had just happened yet.

After school I was with my Poppy and Grandma Sara in the kitchen having an after school snack. My Grandma turned on the news...and there it was the plane going strait in to one of the twin towers.

 How could it happen? Why didn't someone stop it? Was it a mistake? After all no one could have killed so many people on purpose? ...RIGHT? 

But it was no mistake. At five I could barely understand that, in my innocence I wanted to believe it wasn't so. This plan crash shattered my perfect world, in perfect wolds people don't just crash planes in to buildings. These are things that just don't happen in perfect worlds, therefore the world I live in must not be perfect. For most people this is something that is a concept that is developed over time, helped along by small evils not a concept that comes to light all at once. For me and many children around my age at the time we did learn that concept all at once, we do not live in a perfect world.

Even today I struggle with that fact that someone wanted to crash a plane in to a building. A person knowingly killed hundreds of people. People who have friends and family, spouse and children. Our country is still at war. We are still healing from the attacks of 9/11. It will take time and we probably never will be completely healed, always bearing a scare.

This post is for all the victims of 9/11, their children and families, its for all the first respondes that help save lives that day.