Many details escape me, but I know where I was and what I was doing when I first heard that a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center. I was playing volleyball in the gymnasium of a community college in Upstate New York, about a three hours drive north of New York City.
There were probably thirty or forty of us in class on that day. While we were all spread out across two courts playing volleyball, a professor walked into the gym and said something to the effect of A plane just crashed into the World Trade Center. We’re under attack.
Maybe she didn't walk into the gym. Maybe she ran into the gym. I don’t know. I didn’t notice her entrance. I was concentrating on the game I was playing, possibly looking forward at the net, or looking backward toward one of the other players on my team who was getting ready to bump the ball. At that exact moment, the way that everything unfolded is unclear to me.
I have a feeling that the professor who told us about the attack was a woman. It seems to me that she came running into the gym and called out to everyone that a plane had crashed into the twin towers before going over to our volleyball coach and quietly telling her the news. I could be wrong, though.
What I do know is that the professor’s announcement didn’t have much of an impact on my classmates and I. Her words got lost in the vastness of the gymnasium. Their magnitude and the extraordinariness of their claims didn’t penetrate the ordinariness of our daily lives.
People didn’t immediately stop what they were doing. They didn’t experience a sudden sense of shock. Rather, they continued playing volleyball until the end of class with a slight awareness that something was happening in New York City.
Personally, I wasn’t very affected by the attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001. I didn’t lose anybody in the attacks, and I wasn’t near any of the locations where the attacks happened. Because of this, I don’t have many lasting memories or impressions from that day. There are, however, two feelings that I felt very strongly on that day, and in the days that followed as well. I don’t think I will ever forget how those feelings felt.
As I learned more about the attacks, I began to feel vulnerable, as if I were completely exposed to and unprotected from hidden dangers that could strike at any time and any place. On that day, I had the feeling that what was happening was just the beginning of something that was going to get bigger and bigger, that it was something that was going to continue onward at an unimaginable scale. On that day and the days that followed, I had the feeling that everyone I knew could be taken from me, or me from them, at any moment. It was the first time in my life that I felt truly vulnerable.
I also had a very strong sense of strangeness, as if the world around me had somehow been replaced by a similar but alternate one.
In the early hours of that day, people somehow stopped looking like ordinary living people. I remember specifically listening to the radio in my car as I drove home from that volleyball class and looking at the people in the cars driving past me. Their faces were completely slack and expressionless. They didn’t look like they were alive anymore. They looked like something else, something not quite human in the sense that we know it.
As I walked through the streets near my home that night, I remember looking up at the sky and it was silent. For many days after, it remained silent. In the space that was normally bustling with the steady motion of airplanes and their lights, there was silence. That silence seemed to echo the silence in the hearts and faces of the people I had seen throughout the day.
More so than the attacks, I think, it was the emotional reaction I saw in so many people that day, the shock and fear that made the biggest impression on me.
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Where were you on September 11, 2001, when you first heard about the attacks that occurred on that day? Please share your story in the comments below.