7 years later....

I am sitting here, forgot completely about last week being 7 years since 19 crazy boys (they were not men) took over 4 planes and crashed them in various places and killing 3000 people.

9/11/01 I was in Boulder, Colorado with my family visitng my brother and my now ex sister in law who was pregnant at the time with Gaia. 9/11 was my brother's 25th birthday and to this day I remember joking with my brother growing up that his birthday was 9-1-1 and how cool it was. My mom and I were flying back to Washington DC and were in the air when the attack first began. The pilot came on to inform us that we were being re-directed to Alberta, Canada and it was odd, but he didn't tell us until we got onto the ground what had happened.

When we got into terminal, thats when I saw the 2nd plane hit the World Trade Center and that first image you never will forget. You won't forget what your first thought was when you saw that, and to be honest I didn't know what it meant. Then we heard that the Pentagon was hit by a plane and I looked at my mom and said to call my aunt and find out where my uncle and cousins were in comparison.

You couldn't take your eyes off the TV sets and watching what was happening in NY was just like a dream, nightmare more like it. Watching the twin towers fall, was unreal. I remember visitng 2 years before and being mesmorized by how awesome it was to be so far up in the air. Watching the TVs I never dreamt they would come down the way they did. And between those two, if memory serves me right, you hear about plane #4 crashing in Pennsylvania. Everyone around me was like America is under attack, and being 20 years old I wasn't comprehending what was going on and it was unreal. Even more unreal when the news came about my uncle...

Fastforward to 9/11/08....7 years later....5 memorials later....didn't want to get up and go to the ceremony, but I am glad I did. Trust me after 5 years straight, it got old for me, but this year they unveiled the permanent oudoor memorial to the victims of the Pentagon and Flight 77. 184 benches layed out like the shape (to me, might have been my imagination) of a wing of a Pentagon...and if you know what you are looking at it, you will also see the path Flight 77 took, there's a path and if you look straight ahead from it, it leads to where the plane hit. From the innocence of the children on board to the those who were in the prime of their life, it memorializes those who were taken from earth way too soon. It symbolizes them in life and death.

We mark the times that changed America forever each year on Setember 11th and we will never forget the events of the day, where we were that day and what that day might mean to people. It will always be my brother's birthday, it will always be the last time I saw my ex sister in law pregnant with my niece, be the day we joked that it would've been nice to have hit 2 birds with one stone if my niece was born on her daddy's birthday. There are so many thoughts/memories from that day, that have never gone away.

I don't think they ever will....