I was 23 years old on September 11, 2001.
I was asleep when a friend started calling me so relentlessly that I thought she might break my phone.
Turn on the television.
Something has happened.
Like millions of people, I turned it on and then barely turned it off for the rest of the week.
We watched the footage over and over. The planes. The buildings. The smoke. People running through streets covered in ash. First responders moving in the opposite direction. And the towers falling.
I remember the strange incomprehensibility of it. We knew what we were watching, but there was some part of the mind that couldn't absorb that it had actually happened.
I remember wanting desperately to go to New York.
I had no particular skill that would have been useful there. I was a 23-year-old college student on the other side of the country. But I wanted to help. I wanted to do something. Standing far away and watching felt unbearable.
Eventually the televisions turned off. Work resumed. Airports reopened. America changed in ways we understood immediately and in ways we wouldn't understand for years.
And life did what life does. It continued.
Twenty-five years passed.
Today, at 48, I found myself watching the remembrances again. I wasn't prepared for how deeply they would affect me.
The images haven't changed. The buildings fall exactly as they did when I was 23. The photographs are the same photographs.
But I am not the same person watching them.
This time, I kept thinking about the voices.
The calls between husbands and wives. Partners. Parents and their children. People calling home from airplanes and offices because somewhere inside an unimaginable morning, they understood that this might be their last opportunity to say something to someone they loved.
I thought about the flight attendants who kept doing their jobs in circumstances no one could have prepared them for. Betty Ong and Amy Sweeney relaying critical information from American Airlines Flight 11. CeeCee Lyles calling home from Flight 93. The passengers and crew who learned what was happening elsewhere and made the decision to fight back.
At 23, I knew those calls were heartbreaking.
At 48, I hear them differently.
Twenty-five more years of loving people will do that.
Twenty-five years of knowing what it is to wait for someone's call. To recognize a person's voice before they've finished saying hello. To know someone's routines. Their coffee order. The way they sleep. The ridiculous thing that always makes them laugh. The argument you wish you'd handled differently. The ordinary language two people invent simply by sharing enough life.
Twenty-five more years of understanding what it actually means for another human being to become part of the architecture of your days.
And then I thought about the ordinariness of that morning.
People got dressed for work. They poured coffee. They kissed someone goodbye. They complained about traffic. They made plans for dinner. Someone probably left a dish in the sink. Someone was irritated with their partner. Someone said, "I'll call you later."
Thousands of people walked into an ordinary Tuesday believing there would be Wednesday.
There is something almost unbearable about knowing what they didn't.
I have now lived more years after September 11 than I had lived before it.
That realization stopped me today.
The 23-year-old watching television in disbelief could not have known what the next 25 years would contain. Who she would love. Who she would lose. The homes she would enter and leave. The friendships that would last and the ones that wouldn't. The things she would survive. The things that would become precious to her only because time taught her their value.
Maybe that is why September 11 found me differently this year.
The event hasn't changed.
I have.
At 23, I watched thousands of lives end and understood that something terrible had happened.
At 48, I find myself thinking about all the ordinary life contained inside those lives.
The birthdays that didn't happen. The dinners that weren't eaten. The trips never taken. The arguments that never got resolved. The children who grew up. The partners who learned how to wake up in a bed that suddenly had an empty side.
All the mundane, irritating, beautiful repetition of being alive that nobody standing there that morning knew they were experiencing for the last time.
I don't want to turn that into a lesson. Some things deserve more reverence than that.
Today I simply want to remember the people who woke up on September 11, 2001 expecting an ordinary day, and the people who loved them.
Especially the ones who answered a ringing phone and heard a familiar voice on the other end.
Twenty-five years later, I find myself thinking about those voices. About what we reach for when everything else falls away.
Someone we love.
And the chance to tell them.
To the 2,977 people whose lives were taken, to those who ran toward danger to save strangers, to those who carried the loss home, and to every family still carrying it twenty-five years later: we remember you.
