On September 11, 2001, I had started my second week as a freshman at the University of Richmond in Virginia. I won’t get into the details of how every moment unfolded, but I watched the Twin Towers smoking on a TV screen in the Commons as I hurried to class and thought it was a movie, and ended up watching them — two buildings I had visited on field trips and seen countless times during my childhood — reduced to rubble during the span of my 75-minute sociology class.
When the screen showed the Pentagon on fire, the Australian guy sitting next to me asked what the building was, and my voice cracked when I said it was supposed to house the brains behind our national defense.
It was a weird day. As so many people can probably remember, there was no sense of how many more planes might be in the air, heading to symbolic targets instead of the nearest runway. One of my first friends at Richmond was unable to speak to anyone until he heard from his dad, who worked in one of the lower floors of a World Trade Center building. My old high school friends and I were furiously instant-messaging each other to make sure everyone was OK. I sat with my new college friends, sobbing with my eyes glued to the TV.
I was lucky. Nobody I knew directly was killed, and — aside from a brief time when the National Reserve building in Richmond was listed as a potential target — I was sitting safely, 360 miles from Ground Zero.
But I’ve never wanted to be back in New Jersey so much. I had prided myself on how comfortably I shifted into college life. Though I had been homesick on other trips in the past, I was doing great. And then so suddenly I wanted more than anything to back in my small Jersey town, surrounded by people who really understood my loss — not of family, friends, or colleagues. But of an icon that was regularly the backdrop of my childhood, and, of course, a feeling of safety.
I would never claim to have been a true victim of 9/11. But there’s a large group of us out there whose 9/11 stories don’t include any tangible loss or moment of panic. They just include a dull pain, a hole in the skyline, and a feeling of wanting to be home.
I think more than anything, we just wanted it to be yesterday, and to have had the chance to appreciate the world around us (even the parts of it that stood 360 miles away) a little bit more.