Sep 11.
It’s funny how the mind remembers moments so vividly. Not days but small snippets of one’s life. It was 9 years ago today now but I can remember that morning like it was just last week. Being woken up by my mum standing there with her jumper on and hair swept up in a pony tail holding a crumpled tissue with tears staining her cheeks. In my half awake morning state I remember frantically asking what was wrong and what had happened and she just said Americas been attacked and so many are dead. She kept saying it’s horrible, so horrible, grasping her tissue as if the reality of some human nature had just become too much to bare. I remember watching images on the television sitting in my school uniform eating breakfast on the couch. The broadcast was so erratic and unplanned jumping from replays of the plains tearing into the towers to quick news updates on what the current situation was, statements from heads of government and live images from across the water of a smoking city. The family that used to car pool me and my brother hadn’t heard of what happened as they didn’t watch television in the mornings and I remember sitting in the car driving to school not fully grasping the extent of what had just happened across the other side of the world while I was sleeping. I don’t remember what school was like that day; how the teachers were acting, what happened that lunch or exactly what my mum was doing when I returned that afternoon. But I do remember the constant television broadcast of newly received footage, of running people through a city of grey, of crumbling buildings as if they were made from silt and of bodies, so many bodies hurtling towards earth from great heights out of desperation. I do remember thinking that I suppose that way you could be at peace in the air for a good few seconds and look at the world for one last time like you’d never seen it before your life was cut off. But I also remember thinking what it would have been like running from the site with bodies splattering around you and what would happen to something dropped from such a height. I recall the search for survivors that continued for weeks; that clouded grey landscape filled with towering spikes of rubble and remaining window structures looking somehow satanic. Yes some memories in life will never be forgotten just as hopefully those almost 3000 people won’t be either. I just hope the world has learnt something from that day. RIP.
