My memory of the day is hazy, but some things are so clear it’s as if they happened yesterday. For instance, I can’t remember if I started with band or jazz band, or if I headed from the band-room to chemistry or home-room. Both my A and B days sophomore year started with the same two classrooms until lunch broke the monotony, so that seems like an understandable omission. Some random things, however, I do remember: I was wearing my favorite pair of red Chuck Taylor’s which still had pink spray paint on them from a fundraising event, my walk to school that morning had been fairly cool but awfully humid for September, and the night before my friends and I skipped Bible study at the Redford’s to play pool and board games in my Grandpa’s basement.

I got to my second class late, saw the side-eyeroll from Mr David’s, and found my desk which I’d slouch in until lunch. But an announcement broke the silence, the teacher turned on the old TV that hung from the wall, and as he found the news, we saw the NYC skyline with smoke billowing out of the famous World Trade Center. As the camera pushed in, we could see one tower was burning; a hole punched through it around the top fifth of it’s height. The smoke was thick and dark gray, pouring out of the hole in Tower 1 while it’s twin stood beside it, quietly watching; helpless as it’s sibling fought for it’s life, still full of people.

I don’t remember a room ever being that quiet; not just a classroom… but any room, ever; before or since.

It was 10am on a Tuesday in September, and that felt like something important I needed to remember. While my brain was trying to etch details into my memory as we pieced together what was happening from the broadcasters chaotic narrative, another plane appeared and hit the second tower a little closer to it’s center. It became immediately clear this wasn’t an accident. And over the next hour we watched as people fell and/or jumped from insane heights, unable to escape the flames and smoke by any other means. Another plane struck the Pentagon. There were reports of a fourth plane that crashed in a field. All air travel was grounded.

Then the unthinkable… Tower 2 collapsed; and soon after it, Tower 1 joined it’s twin. New York City was covered in ash.

Everything that had seemed so important just a few moments ago felt hollow. Time slipped by as the news kept going. We were released to lunch sometime later, but by that time several students were being pulled out of school by their parents. We heard that Fort Leavenworth was on full security lock-down; my dad worked there so I found myself wondering what he was doing during all of this. Some students chose to skip the rest of the day, parent’s permission be damned. I stayed but don’t remember the afternoon. No classes were taught… we just stared at the news flooding out of our TVs and wondered what was next…

Every generation has at least one “where were you” moment, and I guess 9/11 is the one owned primarily by millennials. It was the moment where our lives changed in ways so fundamentally that it’s hard to remember the before times.

For example, did you know that prior to 9/11, anyone could take a Leatherman multi-tool on the plane with you?! That feels insane… those things have fold-out knives on them that can be as long as your palm and no one would expect to make it through security with that today. We can’t even board without dumping your open water bottle and getting a full body scan. I don’t think most of us can recall boarding a plane without a stupid amount of security, or what politics looked like before the right took an off-ramp towards fascism and the left settled for centrist compromises. And, at least those of us in the Mid-West grew up among such blatant Islamophobia and loud-mouthed posturing about “securing the borders” that old movies and TV shows have a cultural dissonance that’s hard to overlook.

A country founded on ideals of religious freedom turned completely against an entire religion and culture because of extremists who claimed to practice it. A country founded by immigrants has turned against them now, becoming isolated and scared of anyone who seems different. And the government decided it’s own people couldn’t be trusted and started spying on all of us all the time; with no warrant or cause, Americans became as much of a threat to “America” as anyone else.

So, I guess the answer to “what’s next” was the collapse of our freedoms and the loss of our American ideals.

Whether we like to admit it or not, 9/11 was a painful gut-shot that we barely hobbled away from scared and afraid. We became paranoid and closed ourselves off from everyone, whether they wanted to help or not; and without properly addressing that wound, it’s gotten worse. Slowly bleeding out and becoming infected, we are surely on our deathbed. Not due to the attack itself, but our response to it.

In the immediate future, for that 15yr old sophomore in high school, 9/11 meant I saw seniors I’d known for most of my life graduate and go to war, instead of college. It meant I couldn’t visit dad at work anymore, unless we were willing to have the car inspected while Humvee’s and Tanks, with mounted machine guns pointed our direction, stared us down. It meant the church and most adults I knew became radicalized by Republican talking points which soothed their fears by having them turn-in their freedom and turn off their brains.

It meant the end of one reality, and the beginning of another one. In the words of the MCU, it was a nexus event that created a new branch of reality. We started down that different path, and any plans I had for the future drifted away with the smoke and ash of the twin towers.

And on each anniversary, I find myself wondering what would have happened if the 2000 election had gone differently… if those hanging chad’s on terribly designed voting ballots hadn’t been the deciding factor… where would we be if the idiot Bush & ruthless Cheney hadn’t been in charge of America’s response? And how would the people who died that day, whether civilians or first-responders, look at us today? I can’t imagine they’d be proud of the two useless wars in the Middle East or the random personal attacks on POC which has led to more loss of life than the attacks that took them away from us prematurely. It’s an exercise in futility, probably more harmful than helpful, but I find myself doing that every September anyway.

20 years later… I’ve lived longer on this side of 9/11 than prior to it, but I still feel like that confused fifteen-year old kid, staring at the world he just lost, wondering… what’s next?