There is nothing special or new or even particularly interesting about my 9/11 story. I was two weeks away from my sixteenth birthday and just started my junior year of high school in South Portland, the only home I had ever known. I was sitting in band rehearsal in the second period of the day when Erin Falconer sauntered into the practice room twenty minutes late. I had known Erin for my whole childhood. We went to the same elementary and middle school; she lived down the street from my best friend and next door to my hairdresser, a friend of my Mom’s. Her dad coached me in softball. I was never more than friendly with her, though, and there is no reason I should remember her, ten years later, when we aren’t even facebook friends.
Erin was the type of student who usually showed up late and didn’t care. She wore pants that were so baggy you couldn’t see her feet. Our shared geography and affinity for band were all we had in common. She sauntered into the band room that day, late slip in her hand, and said with an air of nonchalance, “All of the secretaries in the main office are freaking out. Apparently a plane hit the World Trade Center in New York.”
At the time, I didn’t know that I had just learned of a terrorist attack. I didn’t realize that I would spend my next class, a study hall, watching the towers fall over and over again on a television the teacher had rolled into the room. I didn’t expect to become addicted to the twenty-four hour news coverage. I wasn’t yet haunted by the picture of the young Indian man who ate at the restaurant I worked at near the hotel where the hijackers were known to have stayed. I would never have heard the rumors that circulated around school that afternoon about our town’s rank on a maximum destruction for minimal effort list based on the amount of oil stored near our school. I probably couldn’t have even picked the World Trade Center towers out of a New York City skyline poster. Most of all, I had no way to know that moment would define my generation.
There will always be the demarcation lines. We are old enough to remember where we were when we heard the news. We are young enough to have it define our worldview. We never voted in an election where terrorism wasn’t an issue. We don’t understand wars that have an end. We look back on the Clinton-era as the good old days when the most outrageous lying that went on in Washington was about extramarital sex, not weapons of mass destruction. The victims of the lies suffered embarrassment rather, not death.
When we graduated high school, we left our parents and our lives for a world that was scary in ways that were never known before. The first time I ever lived on my own, I lived on the eleventh floor of an eighteen story, three-tower dorm in Boston. Somehow navigating my first day of classes, figuring out the train system, and living in a high rise became political acts. We wouldn’t let the terrorists win.
Ten years later, the lasting effects are becoming clearer. We weren’t shaped by the unity that came in the days following the attacks, but rather the response that followed. We are cynical and untrusting. We are disengaged. We mourn the deaths of that day, but we don’t mourn the loss of America as a super power. We never knew that America.
Earlier this year, when I learned that Osama bin Laden had been killed, I sat in my studio apartment in Brookline once again unable to turn off the new coverage, tearing up. I frantically reloaded twitter, searching for the latest reaction. I texted my friends, hoping they were still awake. It wasn’t long before I realized I was sobbing uncontrollably. I cried because remembered what it was like to be proud of my country. I cried for all the people who died trying to kill this man. I cried because someone else died. I cried because I felt relieved from ten years of stress that I didn’t know I had. But mainly, I cried because I will always remember Erin Falconer.
