I was nineteen years old, a sophomore in college living in the dorms at Oakland University in Michigan. That morning I skipped my 8 am class because I had stayed up late the night before. I woke up around 8:15, for my 9:20 class. I remember walking the half mile to my class and thinking what a beautiful day it was.

Even in Michigan, the sky was a perfect fall blue.

I went upstairs to the third floor where there was a little student lounge. A colleague named Holly asked if we had heard, that a plane had hit the World Trade Center. Someone laughed and said "if they keep attacking those buildings, eventually they are going to come down". I went to my class. By then, the second plane had hit. It was a small seminar class, our Professor was in tears. She was terrified. At nineteen, I couldn't grasp her fear.

A few minutes later, we were notified that the campus was going on lockdown. The Pentagon was hit. Other planes were down. We were located a mile from the world headquarters of Chrysler, we might be a target. I still didn't quite grasp it. I walked back to my dorm. I sat with my fellow residents around the lounge TV and saw the first tower fall. Then, we waited for the inevitable. We knew the North Tower would fall too. By that point, there were rumors of forty planes down all over the country. Cell phones barely worked. I don't remember feeling anything except utter confusion and consciously knowing that I was not able to comprehend something I should be comprehending.

After the second tower fell, the world went quiet, and numb. My boyfriend drove onto campus and, not knowing what to do, we went out for Chinese food. Then we bought a newspaper: 9,11,2001 with some mundane story about the Detroit Tigers. We knew we'd want to save it. We drove around aimlessly, the only car on a normally busy road. An eerie silence hovering over us.

Over the next week, I worked at my student job at a tech desk and poured over the newly invented Google Images search. Images which have long since been scrubbed from the internet filled my screen, staying with me forever. Bits and pieces of stories stuck: a man waves a white tablecloth from the North tower who never survived, people holding hands in mid-air, a man who had fallen, lying on the ground in pieces: mangled but his suit still in perfect condition, a man outside of the towers, pressed against two beams, trying to climb down. People and individual stories...snuffed out. By a man whose name was starting to be said over and over: Bin Laden.

People elsewhere in the country remember unity. Living near one of the largest Arabic speaking areas of the country, I remember hatred and retaliation. I remember my Muslim friends being afraid, and hiding. I remember the benefit concert on every channel, and feeling of exhaustion from the grief. I purposefully chose to shut it all down. I didn't look again until 2015. Then I watched the news reports again and was flooded with grief, sobbing alone in my apartment. I realized that my life had been perfectly separated: childhood was pre 9/11, and adulthood was post. 9/11 divided it forever.

The hardest part to tell younger people: it never occurred to us that this could happen. We were truly innocent, like children believing in Santa Claus. America was so isolated, so strong, so protected, so safe. The idea of this happening here was so unfathomable, that it felt almost laughable.

In February of 2026, I finally made my way to New York and paid my respects. The pools felt small. Too small. Even at the treeline, I couldn't imagine these massive towers with elevator banks which stretched for a full acre per floor. I couldn't wrap my mind around the idea that this beautiful pristine place...had been the same place I had seen on the news that day. I went up to the top of the Observatory, and looked out at the Statue of Liberty and realized that I was staring through the space just 100 feet away...which was once Windows on the World. And the man who had waved the tablecloth, had seen the same view in his last moments. I cried, while tourists from Japan next to me smiled and took selfies. Then I went back to the pools and in the cold February air, forced myself to read every single name out of respect. Knowing I'd never be able to come back. I went into the museum. I felt the weight of grief on me, like when my grandparents had died. I realized that this was a wound which would never close. All those people, and I was just a 19 year old kid hundreds of miles away who could do nothing.

Around me in the museum, you could tell who was over 35 and who wasn't. Those of us who were older hunched our shoulders, our jaws were clenched as we relived that day. The young ones stood taller, this wasn't there burden. They listened and respectfully learned. But they didn't feel it the way we did. After the first floor exhibit, I went back to my hotel and slept for eighteen hours, too depressed to do anything else.

It never quite leaves me. Kevin Cosgrove's last cry as the tower collapsed. Melissa Doi saying that she knew she would die. Edna Cintron waiving. Jonathan Briley falling. Ruth McCourt and her baby daughter dying overhead while her brother scrambled to safety below. The woman saying "I'm not dead" with the black tag. The sight of the "Meteor". When people ask that silly question "what would you do if you woke up tomorrow and realized it was 1995 again?" I think: I'd hug my grandparents and then spend the next six years finding a way to convince everyone of what is about to happen. To stop it somehow.

It's like it never actually ended.