On 9/11

The History Channel is running a retrospective on 9/11 tonight. I’m recording it. As I look back over the last 7 years, it’s hard to believe that it was so long ago, but also, so short. So much as changed in my life since 2001. I was a newlywed, and a college student who didn’t know what she wanted to do with her life. The highest job that I had reached was waitress, and I had never even considered the idea of law school.

As I look back, I think that I have forgotten a lot of the true, unbearable absurdity of that day. The dazed look around campus as I walked to class knowing that things are different now. The voice of my history professor, explaining that he couldn’t lecture that day, because this was going to be big, big, bigger than Pearl Harbor, he didn’t know what it would mean. Attempting to find some normalcy as I watched the news with some of my classmates while we stuffed envelopes for the Honor’s program, a promise to help that I had made seemingly a century ago.

I think that in a lot of ways, the human mind tries to gloss over these things and forget them. I think that its easier that way, to not dwell on the bad. And I’m not sure that I want to remember, to relive. But then, I think that in some ways it’s necessary. I think that it’s more human to remember, to not lose touch with what happened, and why. If I forget, then I am nothing, and I can do nothing to make it better.