10 years ago.

It's hard for me to believe that it's been 10 years since that terrible day. It is strange to me that my children will never know what it was like to be alive on that day, but at the same time I am glad they did not have to live with the same fear and dread we did the months after 9/11.
In September 2001 I had just been married for 5 months and was working as a massage therapist at Spa Malia. That Tuesday I worked at 2pm so I slept in a little(8:30!) and then got ready to start my day. I called my sister in law, Lori, to talk about some babysitting I was doing for her later in the week. As soon as she picked up the phone she said 'Are you watching the news? A plane just hit the World Trade Center in New York'. I turned on ABC new to Diane Sawyer and Charlie Gibson and hung up the phone with Lori(her father was living in New York and she was going to try and call him). I had only been watching for a few minutes, wondering how some idiot could accidentally have flown into a great big building, when the second plane hit.
Moments like that, when you are 20 and think terrorism only happens in far away dusty countries, are when a part of you matures in a matter of seconds.
We all say we will never forget but as I watched the news footage played from that day all over again on Sunday I realized I forgot a few things. I forgot thinking there was a ton of debris falling from the towers and then realizing those were people jumping to their deaths. In the days after the attacks there would be footage of firemen under a walkway between the two towers who were startled every time a body would hit the roof above them with a thunderous THUD. I forgot about fact that for a while we had no idea what really happened and that the first responders on the ground knew the least about what was going on.
As the morning unfolded and reports of the Pentagon being hit and then the crash in Shanksville, Pa came in, a disbelieving attitude fell over me. This just could not be happening. But then I had a comment pop into my head "We walked around the Pentagon like we owned it". I knew it was a friend talking about their dad getting a job there recently but for the life of me I could not remember who it was.
I watched both towers fall live on TV. Knowing that untold numbers of people just vanished in front of you was sickening, literally.
The pictures of a mass exodus out of lower Manhattan and of military personnel evacuating the Pentagon were gut wrenching. Cell phones were useless and no one knew where their family and friends were. The panic was clear on every face.
Coming out of NYC after the towers fell, everyone was covered in dust. Most had streams of tears making paths through the dust on their cheeks.
Then, I remember. It was my best friend Kirstin, who told me she had been walking around the Pentagon. It was her dad who had just taken a job there. Calls to her cell and her parents home went unanswered. With panic rising I called her grandmother in Suffolk to see if she had heard from her son. This took me on a wild goose chase but eventually we figured out everyone in her family was OK.
At noon, work called to say they were closing for the day. Every single client had called to cancel.
Around this time I was also called by my mom to let me know that my dad, who was the Commanding Officer of the USCG cutter Resolute, had to deploy. He was leaving for an unknown amount of time and there was no time to say goodbye.
The only thing there was to do was watch the new coverage. It was all that played for days. For months it is all anyone talked about. People hung flags, wore red, white and blue. It was like the 4th of July everywhere you went minus the fireworks. We made bracelets to show solidarity, donated money, vowed to never forget and to stand united. The nation was brought together, police officers and firemen were made into the heroes they are and we shortly became a country at war.
Adam and I spent Sunday watching all of the footage over again. I still cannot believe that it has been 10 years. My story is small compared to what those in NYC and DC went through that day. Even still,  I write this as a preservation of my memories of that day. We use this blog as a family scrapbook I thought it was important to make sure my children know about that terrible day in our history.