How I was affected

I know this post is a little late, but I am sitting here on 9/11 and remembering what life was like 10 years ago.
I was a freshman in high school, literally only into the second week of school.  I’d spent the night at my dad’s house the night before, something I did once a week from 7th-12th grade. I was getting ready for school. The phone rang and my dad answered, I heard mumbling, then the TV turned on, my dad handed me the phone. It was my mom, sobbing, telling me a plane had crashed into the Twin Towers.  Honestly, I didn’t really think anything of it, I thought it was just a plane crash, and couldn’t understand why she was crying so much. Then I walked into the living room and saw the news.

That was all we talked about in school that day. That was, once it was decided that school was a safe place to be that day. Everything was a big blur, and the vision of those planes crashing into the buildings played over and over and over again, on TV, in my head. To this day, I have dreams of planes crashing, and I feel panic rise inside me when I see planes flying low to the ground.  I started to understand what was happening, but only in that same confused way that everyone else did.

Ten years later the world is a different place. Cell phones are smaller, smarter, faster. We have Facebook, Twitter, and Blogs. We can connect instantly to the rest of the world, and social media has helped us reach out to humanity through wars, attacks, earthquakes, hurricanes and tsunamis. But travelling to another country is an ordeal, you can’t pack shampoo or toothpaste in your carry-on, and despite everything that could keep us together, we’re all still very much apart from each other.

It’s September 11th, 2011 and I’m still so afraid that in my life time, my children’s life time, and that in the whole history of our Earth, these devastating acts could occur again. I’m afraid of losing a loved one, being lost, of having to pick up pieces after an explosion. I’m afraid that as a nurse, I won’t be able to think straight, stay on my toes and help where I am needed, should I be needed. I don’t want to be afraid, I don’t want terrorists to have one in that sense, but I am afraid. But somehow, despite the fear, I can keep going, knowing that I do live in the land of the free, the home of the brave. Brave – it’s being absolutely afraid of something, but doing it anyway, because we believe in it. And that’s what we all have to be. That’s who we are as Americans.  So on this tenth anniversary of that tragic day in history, let us remember the men and women who gave their lives, and let’s pray for peace. God Bless the USA!