Ten years post 9/11.

Ten years ago today, I was getting ready in my college dorm room, drying my hair watching the news like I always did. I only had one class that day, so I had some time. And suddenly the news switched to one of the Twin Towers on fire.

My brain flashed everywhere - to my family on Long Island who had been planning a site-seeing trip that week for some friends; to two months before, nearly to the day and hour, that my feet were firmly inside the parimeter of one of the towers; to what a horrible accident, and those poor souls on the plane.

It never ocurred to me that a pilot wouldn't have had that kind of accident. Then I watched the plane fly into the second tower, and this realization washed over me that this had to have been intentional.

Murder.

I stopped drying my hair and picked up the phone. No calls could get through to a single family member in New York. It would be days before we were certain they were ok; thankfully, they had already gone site seeing and were ok.

I didn't know what this meant for our world.  Suddenly, it felt like I wasn't a child anymore.  I wasn't a college kid, I was an adult. And the world was crumbling around me.

In Ann Arbor, we had a vigilant that night. I was surrounded by hundreds of other young adults who, like me, didn't know where their place was anymore. We had seen something that took our innocence from us. 

I remember looking up in the sky that night, the first of two no fly nights when every plane was grounded, and realized that it was the first time in my life that I'd know for sure the lights I saw were stars and not planes. Somehow that was profound for me.

That Saturday, I went to a football game at Michigan Stadium, the largest stadium in the country (I think).  We had a moment of silence after the anthem. I was already fighting back tears, but the fact that so many people were so silent for such a national loss was amazing.  I've never felt anything like it before. I think it was the first time I really felt American. And then the jets flew over - I still can't remember why they were at Michigan Stadium - and my breath was just taken away.

September 11th changed me.  I have new things to worry about: how close we live to a nuclear power plant, "just in case"; where we're going and if its a terrorist threat; who may want to harm me on a plane. I think about what would happen if I were separated from Griffin and Ryan if there were another terrorist threat, and how I would move the earth to get back to them and keep our family safe.

It's scary, this post-September 11th world we live in, and it's changed a lot of things. There's more racism than I thought still existed, and I think in twenty years if we look back at this time in history we'll start to see the extreme nature of our distrust and assumptions of the Arab American community and Islam.  It feels like we live in a different world, and maybe we do.