Four Years Later

It doesn't seem like four years since I was a junior at Syracuse. It doesn't seem like it's been four years since I lived in a single in Shaw Hall. It doesn't seem like four years since my family officially moved to a suburb in New Jersey. And it doesn't seem like four years since the world changed.

On 9/11/01, I was in Syracuse. It was a normal, nice day and I had class at 10 AM. I walked to Newhouse, where my class was and stopped at the coffee shop to buy a muffin and orange juice with my SU ID card. That was when I noticed something odd. When I came in, usually, before this class, there was never more than three or four people in the coffee shop, but today there was about ten people huddled around a tv set that was suspended from the ceiling. I bought my breakfast and glanced at the tv. It was tuned to the news and showing a building with something sticking out of it. The sound on the tv was off, so I read the closed captioning. It seemed that a plane had hit one of the World Trade Centre towers. I stood, transfixed, until I realized that I had class. So I went in to my class, in the big auditorium, which was more like a moved theatre. My professor tuned the screen to the news and we all saw the second plane hit. Then the building began to collapse right in front of us, on this big screen like we were watching a disaster film. The professor had also told us that we could stay if we like, or we could leave. So at that point, I got up and bolted back to my dorm where I called my childhood friend who I knew was in NYC. She wasn't in her room. I somewhat hysterically asked her roommate to have her call me. Then I called my mother. She said my dad wasn't home, he was at work in Philadelphia. It was becoming hard to make phone calls; the lines were becoming jammed.

I went out to dance class later and the campus was deserted. It was normally teeming with life and it was deserted. When I got back, I called my mother again and asked her to have my dad call me when he got in since he was evacuated from his office in Philadelphia. I waited in my room. I didn't go to anymore classes. Finally, I heard form my dad. He was home and he was ok. Then I started IMing my friends on campus. We all met for dinner that night. Since your friends are your family at college, we needed to be together and have a family dinner.

The next night there was a candle-light vigil and I went with some girls from the band. My boyfriend broke up with me that night, but I was so numb that I didn't especially care.

Nobody I knew was directly effected by the events of that day. I don't know anyone personally who worked in the towers. I don't know any firefighters or police or rescue workers personally. I was sad for everyone who did. The thing I did have a personal connection to was New York City. It is the place I made my home since graduation. I knew when I was still at college that it was my home. And my home was attacked. It wasn't safe. On the contrary, it was quite vulnerable.

I did hear a story about an aquaintance's father who worked in the towers, who for some reason, did not go into work on 9/11. In these past four years, things have changed. People do not believe that New York and the US are invincible the way they might have once. Security has tightened. Ground Zero is no longer a site of chaos but a vast, empty pit waiting for something else to be built.