I was seventeen and a senior in high school in Georgia. Second period English Literature class, nothing terribly exciting. We were about 15 minutes into a lecture on Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales when the teacher from next door came in the room. He was absolutely pale, more shaken than I had ever seen him in four years. He didn’t even seem to notice the class when he told my Mrs. Tolliver to turn on the TV; that something terrible had happened. We turned on the TV in the classroom just in time to see explosion as Flight 175 hit the South Tower. I remember the shock that I heard in the TV commentators’ voices. I could hear word spreading down the hall, and could almost feel the same stunned shock and disbelief echoing from my classmates. Class was forgotten. All we could do was watch, along with the rest of the nation, in horror and fear and shock. We were praying that it wasn’t real, that somehow it was just a terrible accident or a bad joke that got seriously out of hand. No one could believe that this was really happening. No one wanted to believe that it was real.

Then, at 9:40, the first reports came on of another crash, another plane smashing into the Pentagon. Then we knew for sure what we hadn’t wanted to admit: this wasn’t an accident. This wasn’t a bad joke. This was real. This was really happening. Someone - we didn’t know who at that time - had attacked us and hurt us. Bad.

We kept watching, numb. No one said anything. No one COULD say anything. We listened to the running commentary on the TV, listening to the reports of air traffic being grounded, flights stopped. We listened to the reports of hijacked planes, the frantic speculation from TV anchors that were just as shocked and at a loss as everyone else in the nation. We watched the chaos on the streets of New York City and in Washington, DC. The whole time, we watched the towers burn. We watched the smoke rising from the Pentagon. And we saw the bodies start falling from the towers; those who preferred death this way than by fire and smoke.

Then it happened. Around 10:00, we saw one of the towers dissolve into a huge cloud of ash and smoke. We saw the TV screen go white as smoke obscured everything in view. When the smoke cleared enough to see again, only one tower was left. For a very long moment, no one said anything - no one could believe what we were seeing. One of my classmates started crying - her uncle worked for a company in the World Trade Center, an insurance company - and she was convinced that she had just seen him die. As it turned out, she had. It was almost anticlimactic as the second tower followed the same ending as the first, around a half an hour later. But those towers - seeing them fall like that - it represented a loss that we could NEVER recover from.

The rest of that day is a numb blur of shock and fear and anger. There was no class. Everyone remained glued to the TVs and radios - any TV or radio that we could find. I could see the same shock and fear that I felt reflected in my classmates’ faces. It felt like our world had been shattered into a billion tiny pieces. The sense of safety and security that we had grown up with - “We’re safe because no one would DARE attack our country” - was gone. The light, carefree world that we had known the day before had abruptly changed forever, and it was suddenly a much darker place. We felt like we had suddenly been forced to grow up too many years in the space of a few hours, and it hurt.

For me and my classmates - both in that school and across the country - we lost the innocence of childhood that day. The comfortable, safe world we had known went down in smoke and fire with the twin towers. Just over eight months after that terrible day, we graduated into a very different world than the classes before us. Some of my classmates are no longer here - casualties of the war that followed on that day. Others are still here, but changed forever because of that war. Just like our country, we have recovered and risen from that day - but we are not the same. Whether soldiers or not, all of us are different than who we might have been had September 11 not happened.