The fizz at the top of a Diet Coke poured into a well worm clear cup at 7am is perhaps an incongruous image to be indelibly tied to my visceral memories of the morning of 9/11, but it was the final oddity of the morning that suggested something was wrong.

Normally, waking up cocooned by the Bay Area September fog meant blankets with clothes tucked under them being warmed by heating vents, my mom making lunches packed in brown paper bags with hand drawn pictures for myself and my sister, and the muted sounds of the Harry Potter audiobook playing on the stereo cassette player to entertain my mom – instead I woke up to the sound of the house phone ringing before drifting back off to a light snooze and my mom waking us up a little while later. No clothes under warm blankets, no hand drawn token of love on the half packed lunches, and none of Jim Dale’s voice detailing Harry’s latest adventures.

I found my mom in the kitchen, pouring a diet coke into a cup and holding her fingers at the lip of that cup to ensure the fizz did not overflow onto the counter. Two other cans, already drained, sat at the edge of the sink and while she was looking at the glass, her gaze was far away and unseeing as she shifted from foot to foot. This was not right, she was not alright.

The thing about being 10 is that you only know the safety and the stability of the world as informed by the assured confidence of the adults around you. While life may have held many uncertain things, people, and experiences for me, and while I often felt unbalanced or scared as I learned how to navigate through life, I had learned to look to the adults around me to understand if whatever I was experiencing for the first time was survivable, then unusual and therefore treat with suspicion.

I had only ever see my mom like this once before, and it had been in a hospital as my parents had been directed to take my brother home and enjoy him while we could, that he was unfortunately “a failure to thrive”. This was not right, she was not alright.

My mom – never one for a loss of words, or hesitant to speak – opened her mouth several times as if ready to tell me something as she gazed into her Diet Coke, and reached for the frozen waffles in the Eggo Box slowly wilting on the counter. Words crept out of her, each pronounced with an unusual weight.

Honey, do you know what the World Trade Towers are?

Nope, sounds like a boring place to work

You know where New York is right?

That’s where Eloise lives in the Plaza Hotel

So, you know there are bad people in the world. Bad people who hurt other people because they’re evil.

….like the bad men in the Bible who work with Satan? Like Voldemort, like Crouch’s son when he pretended to be Mad Eye Mooney?

Yes, and there are bad men in the world called terrorists

Okay…

And the bad men, the terrorists hijacked…took over a few planes this morning

This was not right.

And they crashed them into the World Trade Towers in New York

This was not right

They killed a lot of people

Why? This was not right

They don’t like Americans, they don’t like how we live

Why? And you and Dad could save us if they ever got on a plane with us right?

And in our quiet kitchen lit only by the soft glow of the living room lamp, the sturdy blocks of presumed safety that predicated my exuberant exploration of the world and all it’s scary, but manageable unknowns, crumbled under my feet, because my mother, strong and safe and fiercely protective, didn’t say yes.

She couldn’t say yes, because in this moment she had to explain to me that sometimes bad men win and there was nothing good people could do even if they tried; that terrorists didn’t play by my presumed proper rules of engagement – honestly, how uncivilized and rude; that even if the good people did manage to fight back, not every good person would survive because the terrorist were evil; that sometimes not even the policemen or FBI could protect us from bad people in the world.

I felt the realization like a physical blow – there were things in the world that could overpower even my parents and harm me. Even if everyone did things right, even if my parents fought to protect me, there was evil in the world that could reach out and touch me.

My parents had painstaking crafted a beautiful and blessed life in a bubble for their children. We lived an idyllic life that included exploring in the creek across the street, playing freeze tag in the cul-du-sac with the neighbor kids, being read to by our parents not only at bedtime but during lazy weekend afternoons because we didn’t have a TV, and chasing dad around the house as he called to us in funny voices when he came home from his work trips. All it took was 4 planes and a bright September morning to splinter our utopia.

School that day felt unsettled, teachers were in and out of each other’s classrooms whispering to each other in that tone adults use when something bad happens; adults slipped outside their classroom to crouch down, wrap their arms around themselves and shake like they were crying before standing back up, straightening their shoulders and walking back into their brightly decorated classrooms; police in uniform began appearing at regular intervals past the classroom windows as if patrolling the school; other children were strangely absent with no comment from the teachers as they took roll.

We made signs with messages of love and support to hang in our classroom windows as if those in New York could see them on their drive home, and most of our teachers had elected to make the day a movie day. Their unease and emotional devastation made my vulnerability feel acutely exposed, but the day had one more horror left to bestow on me.

My aunt picked us up from school which was a treat! We loved seeing her and she always had a way of being bigger than life, at last I thought, an adult who can’t be scared by anything she can turn the day around. But as it turned out my aunt had picked us up, because my mom still had not heard from my dad; my dad who had been scheduled to fly back to California on a United Airlines Flight that morning out of Newark Airport.

My family was lucky; my dad’s flight was not Flight 93 which was later described by a Gary Sinise Ambassador as “the first battlefield of the Global War on Terror”. His flight had taken off after Flight 93 and been grounded as per the President’s orders somewhere in Kansas. And in a world before cell phones and airline apps, neither the Airline customer service desks, nor the pay phone lines were built to handle emergency mass groundings. But without a cell phone or line of communication, my mom didn’t know that, and with no TV in the house, and the slow speed at which details emerged, she had tried to function through the day listening to the radio, desperate for any sign or whisper that her husband and the father of her 4 children was safe.

At 10 years old your parents are shining pillars of strength, on that day of 9/11 my mother was fragile and helpless.

As I grew older I learned more details about the tragedies and horrors of the attacks, of the people throwing themselves off the towers so they wouldn’t die from being burned alive, of the way it reformed the social consciousness of the United States, of the once considered Draconian security measures ushered into place and of the heroism of the passengers of Flight 93.

But on that day in 2001, I learned from several sharp shocks that there wasn’t real safety in the world, and that no matter the precautions, I was exposed to the evil that haunts this earth. I was lucky – I lived in California, a world removed from the ravaged parts of New York City, and my dad came home safe after fenagling a rental car and driving back to the Bay Area from the middle of nowhere. But the what ifs haunt me, the nightmares that whisper it could happen to you linger – 9/11 reformed my relationship with the world. And while there has been mostly great joy and great happiness in my life since then, there always lingers the knowledge that next time it could be me, that next time I might have the bad luck to cross paths with someone evil and there is nothing even despite my precautions and everyone’s efforts.