Seven Years Went by in a Flash: Remembering 9/11

I was going to be late for class again. As I hurriedly applied mascara to my lashes, a voice in the background coming from my television made a statement that had me pausing with the Cover Girl wand mid-stroke.
"It appears that the World Trade Center has been either hit or has had a bomb explode within its walls."
I slowly turned to the screen and watched the live picture of one of the World Trade Center towers spewing thick, black smoke from some of its highest floors. Disbelief flooded into me and I raced out of my room to call for my mother and my sister. As I saw the second plane hit as it was happening and as I saw the two towers come crumbling to the ground, fear was not the only emotion settling in- fury and rage consumed and choked the speech out of me as I watched people jumping to their deaths, knowing that they would never have a chance of being saved by a rescue crew of any kind. In the days following some people said that such an act was cowardly; I would just look them in the eye and ask those people, "What real choice did those people have? Burn alive? Suffocate on the smoke?" They did what was necessary for their souls and to them that was the only way out of not suffering to death. That fury that I felt grew as reports came of more flights and more deaths- and of the possible terrorist element. Terrorists? We all had heard of these people all of our lives but had never taken such a threat seriously. We are America, after all. We are the most powerful nation on this earth and nothing can touch us. We were so goddamned wrong.
For the rest of that morning and the months following the terrorist attacks I watched the chaos and the confusion and wondered what the hell was going to happen. It was as if a vise had banded across my heart and I raged at the horrible loss and the helplessness that everyone around me and I felt. This was our country. We lived in the United States of America- this kind of shit doesn't happen to us. Or does it?
Even now, seven years after the fact, I didn't realize how much anger and sorrow was still inside me because of 9/11 until I watched the History Channel's anniversary special. They have created an expose' with the scariest and the most poignant type of material available: normal people in New York City and beyond filming the destruction of the World Trade Center coming down and the aftermath that followed. Seeing a news crew's film coverage is one thing; seeing a regular person with a home video camera is quite another. The news coverage seemed to make the events of that day almost removed from the rest of us, where we felt the horror and the sadness but didn't really allow it to sink it. Seeing the documentation of those regular people slammed the events of 9/11 right into me and I wept for the loss of it all. I weep still.
I don't know if anyone else in another country can feel what us as American's feel as we remember that day. This is our country, our home. This is where we love, cry, laugh, bargain, consider, shop, decorate, read, listen, zone out, surprise, eat, and enjoy: this is where we live. And even though many of us are still cautious of getting on planes and look for suspicious people sitting among us and even though we now know that we are not as invincible as we once thought, there is something that we do still know.
We are Americans and we do not forget.