Ten years ago I awoke on a Tuesday morning in my dorm room at Eastern. It was to be a typical day filled with a class I didn't like and one that I really did. Nothing special at all.
Over my bed was a wall sized cork board. Like you do in college I had covered that obtusely offensive brown with a swatch of cloth to make it more "manly" in my room. Posters of movies dominated the rest of the wall space; framed and hung with care to look like I really did care about the small room that I would call home for the next year of scholasticism. Affixed to that deep navy and electric blue fabric I had haphazardly pinned a number of pics I had in a collage of past events and life in general. When I woke up, just like I did every other day, I gave a quick glance to some of the pics. But then something new happened.
Once my sleep weary eyes were again back to 20/20 I focused on one picture. Nothing special drew me to this pic. It didn't have any bright colors or eye catching beauty to it. It was pretty plane. Just a picture of myself facing the camera while a metropolitan sea of urban landscape in the distance composed my backdrop. The memory that this singular picture brought about filled my brain of such a good trip and time had in my past years before I found myself at this particular point in time. It was just a good time to have my picture taken.
I stared at that photo for an uncharacteristically long time. When I should have been already into my daily routine of prepping for the day I was strangely transfixed on this captured moment in time. The simplistic nature of the photo kept bringing forth new things to look at and new memory flashes. It just made me stop and smile that pic. The one of me facing my fear of heights by standing on the roof of the tallest building I had ever been on. The very roof of the north tower of the World Trade Center in NYC. It was a good picture. But I had to get ready for my class so I started to get dressed and flipped on the TV.
And there was the tower in all its glory. Except smoke was engulfing right where I would have been standing.
On the first glance I thought it was a news story about the anniversary of the bombing in the tower from a few years back. Then I heard Matt Lauer on the Today show just talking about an accident. I didn't really get what had happened so I just assumed it was a fire in the building. Again I stood transfixed by the coincidence that I was just looking at my pic. And then a small white blip entered the screen. That's the moment things became different.
As a fire ball erupted on the screen I heard Matt's voice get excited and fearful in a matter of split seconds. A second accident? Wow, what are the odds. Later that day I would realize that the odds were not good at all.
Yet I watched a little bit more. Chaos ensued as it should have and commentators spent the next minutes recapping and coming to grips with what they just experienced. I on the other hand was getting late for my class. So I turned off the tv, told my roommate what I just saw, and headed out the door.
I was in a class with no TV reception when the buildings took their fateful dive to the surface of the earth. I never got to see it firsthand. Of course I relived that moment through stories and recaps and repeats for weeks on end as the world came to grips with this unprecedented attacks. But when it was happening in real time I was working on a project in my theatre makeup class; marginally unaware at the severity of what I had viewed that morning. There was fear and uncertainty, yes, but not to the extent of what it should have been. We were all sort of detached on September the 11, 2001.
I didn't look at that picture again for seven years. I put it away when I got back to my dorm room for some reason unknown to me at the time. While I was going through my stacks of pictures one day I stumbled across it. And I stared at it again. Through tear streaked eyes I remembered that day and the ones that followed.
Pictures of me in the past 10 years are few and far between. There are those that have chronicled my life in its important moments since that day, but not nearly enough. I just stopped taking the volume of pictures that I used to. Now I don't really like being in pictures all that much. I never knew why until this anniversary came about. I guess I just never wanted to wake up, look at another picture, and have my world rocked again.
The first time I flew in a plane afterwards was, ironically, out of the same airport where the two planes that took down the building has left from. It was an experience filled with an underlying dread that I have not forgotten about in the years past. Luckily I have not had that same volume of unnerving terror since.
I was not there on that day. I may have been a thousand miles away tucked in my safe classroom in Charleston, Illinois yet I have my own story about the day things changed. And I am proud of that. Cause, good or bad, I was part of history in its purest form. I have a story to add to the collective conscientiousness of that day.
That September lead to two more stories in my life that changed it forever. But those are for another time.
