11 September 2015

Never Forget

9/11

Last night, I started a post on the lessons a running injury has taught me, and as I woke up on 9/11, it felt too self-indulgent to me, so it will be posting next week.

How is it fourteen years ago that our world changed?

I was a freshman in college in D.C. I’d just left home a few weeks ago and was navigating this living on my own thing when everything we knew changed. The 250 miles that stood between me and my family and the familiar never felt so far (and thankfully would never feel that far again.) I had just been in the city a week before I left for school. I had lunch with my cousin in a restaurant on one of the lower levels of the World Trade Center.

The city I lived in was attacked, and the city I grew up outside of was attacked. What was safe? At the time, we had no idea. There was a bomb threat at my school two days later, and I sought refuge with a girl who had gone to my high school and went to American and lived off-campus. We didn’t know each other before, but it was the closest to familiar I had at the time. We would later find out that several of our classmates had lost their fathers in the attacks.

Seven years later, I would leave that city and move to this one. My first apartment and office were downtown, and I would walk up Wall Street and over to Broadway to get to work, and for those several years, it was hard walking up Broadway hearing the echoes of the memorial service going on. I’d get to work and feel this strange compulsion to stream the service that was happening just several hundred feet away.

My thoughts go out to anyone who lost someone fourteen years ago or who was here in the city then and has a particularly hard time with this day. I’m off to our studio in LIC for work, and I’m proud that our show today will include a nod to the date.

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