I Remember 9/11

I remember so many little details of September 11th, 2001.  I had just left home for college.  I had only been at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles for maybe 10 days and classes had just started.  I was living in the small wing of a hotel off campus that served as a makeshift dorm for LMU students.  I remember our phone ringing in our hotel room over and over again.  Finally I threw off the covers and picked up.  It was my Mom and she told me to turn on the television.  Being a sheltered young girl I didn't really understand what I was seeing.  World Trade Center?  Terrorists?  It was incredibly overwhelming.  My mom had told me that everyone of a certain age can very clearly answer the question, "Where were you when JFK was assassinated?" and I remember thinking, this is our generations JFK moment.  I couldn't really grasp what was happening but I was sad and terrified.  I decided to walk from the hotel to campus and to go to the gym since all of our classes were cancelled and I needed to move.  It was during that walk that I began to grasp the scope of the attacks.  From the hotel where I lived you could see LAX and there were constantly planes zooming low overhead but that morning it was completely silent.  The Manchester Recreation Center was between the hotel and campus and it was filled, bumper to bumper with police cars.  Twenty two acres of police cars and, next to each car, two policemen stood facing the airport.  Both of the flights that struck the towers were on their way to LAX and they were on high alert.  When I got to the gym I stood on a treadmill for an hour, along with about fifty others, just watching the televisions.  No one was moving.  I eventually walked back to the hotel.  When I arrived I learned that two of the students that lived on my floor lost family members on those two flights.  The young man lost his father and the young woman lost her grandmother.  I had just met them.  I can't remember their names but I remember their faces very clearly and remember watching them be escorted out of the hotel.  I remember thinking, this is just my floor in my dorm and that's when I understood the effect of the terrorist attacks.  The ripple effect of those attacks is still so clear ten years later.  Kyle and woke up and turned on the television this morning.  We were watching the ceremony for ten minutes and the whole time they were reading the names of victims whose last names started with the letter G.  After ten minutes they were still on the letter G.  I felt my eyes sting and tears start to roll down my cheeks.  So many people, so many families and children and loved ones and lives were, and still are, affected by those attacks ten years ago.  So many heroes. My heart goes out to those families and they will be in my thoughts and prayers today and always.