watching: Bleach
listening to: mooore music, k love!
mood: thoughtful

Today a truck driver came in our warehouse we were all talking and we got onto the topic of September Eleventh. He said, “I don’t mean to get political or anything, but sometimes it seems that people forget that 9-11 happened, you know?” and I thought, do I remember 9-11th?
It was an ordinary school day for me. I think I didn’t even know the numeric significance until a couple days after. September is September, nothing happens in it unless its your birthday. I think it’s probably the only month without a hallmark holiday. You see, August has back to school and Labor day. March has St. Patty’s, and April sometimes easter and always April Fools. Nothing happens in September. I think I was in third period before the first plane hit. We were watching the news because it was study hour and we were bored and then, it just happened. People were like, “Hey look, a plane crashed into a building!” And I was thinking, goll, well that’s novel. That doesn’t happen every day your know, like a dog with two heads or a horse/zebra. It was weird because I didn’t know what the World Trade Center was and I really didn’t even consider the fact that someone I knew would be in the building. At least that was part of me. Another part of me which had been paying attention in bible class and had been hearing my teacher rage on and on about the end times and the signs thereto was quietly flooding in to a full fledged panic attack, considering the possibility of this being the end of the world and woe is my, I have so much of my life to live. I just wanted to leave and stop watching the television.
Then I went to choir and my choir teacher (who was also my bible teacher) said that we should go into the library and watch the news (which I was pretty much done with) so that people could cope and we could be kept abreast with the goings on. Then, the second plane hit, and a consensus came over me. I thought, my life is never going to be the same after this. I felt like the entire world had been dropped like a weight on my shoulders, that the sky had fallen and I was being crushed underneath it. I watched the screen and I could almost see Satan settling in the ashes as the chaos and monstrosity played over and over again. I kept on wondering why we had to see this, why couldn’t we just go back to our classrooms and pretend that the world outside of that little high school didn’t exist, but somehow, no matter what I tried to do, I found myself surrounded by a whole room of people, transfixed and reverent, much in the way people were after Columbine, they were all stuck in this moment that I was already all to ready to leave behind. I pulled out my planner. In the back I wrote a note in red pen for times that I was sad. I flipped it open and I began to read. It said that today was a wonderful day. That I felt better than I had ever felt in my entire life. That I had friends that liked me, that I had a family that cared about me and today, everything was going well for me. I wrote that I had written it down because I knew there would be a day when I wouldn’t feel like this, where I would forget all the things that I had and I would be sitting in sadness without knowing a way out. I wrote it because I wanted to remind myself that there were other days, days like those. As I read it, I realized that that note for was a day like that day. And that day I remembered, not all days are like 9-11.
Nothing did change. I changed schools the year afterwards for my own reasons, but it didn’t really “Change my life forever”. I think I heard a lot more from the news, but after hearing about the same stuff every single day, it almost turns into white noise that I almost never concern myself with unless people decide to impolitely broach the forbidden topics of politics and religion over lunch. The only thing that really had changed was the facts, distant inconsequential facts that circulate every day, though you gain nothing by knowing them. Years went by, I forgot about 9-11. Then there was today.
Today was not a special day, no more than that day should have been. I look back on that day and I remember those moments and suddenly I realize something else that I didn’t realize then. You see, today was not special, nothing happened, nothing was new, my life wasn’t changed forever. Sometimes you have these days and you almost feel like jumping off a building to change up the pace. I guess it’s just important to remember that the monotony won’t kill you. In fact, these are the days that you’ll wish you could remember when all other hope is gone.

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