BABY STEPS: Remembering Another Time And World

I was attempting to sleep in my airplane chair, which, even when fully reclined, was still at an 80 degree angle from the floor of the plane. I wrapped myself in a blanket I’d removed from a plastic bag and tried to steady my head on a miniscule pillow as it slipped against the steep incline of the seat. I was trying to ignore the crying baby in front of me and the guy behind me who kept kicking the back of my seat as he attempted to recover some legroom in coach.

Despite my difficulties, I was beginning to drift off to sleep as thoughts of Spring Break danced in my head.

“Excuse me, mister,” a flight attendant screamed from the middle of the plane, looking intently toward the bathrooms at the back of the plane. She chased after a man we could not see.

The passengers’ heads turned in unison towards the back of the plane. The previously bustling flight was silent. We watched as the flight attendant in her bright red Virgin Atlantic uniform scurried away and disappeared behind a wall in the back.

The commotion died down as quickly as it had started. I kept checking behind me every few seconds to see what was happening, but there was nothing out of the ordinary to see.

I never did fall asleep.

Six months ago, this scene would have been mere entertainment, a moment of excitement to punctuate the boredom of my six-hour flight to London. I would have assumed the man had committed some major airline transgression, such as getting out of his seat when the “fasten your seatbelts” sign was still lit.

But this time, my mind was flooded with images of a man detonating a bomb in his shoes.

Before Sept. 11, these ideas would have been the fictional tales of my in-flight reading by Michael Crichton.

Today, they are our new reality.

I woke up on March 11 the same way that I did on Sept. 11, to images of the terrorist attacks on the Today show. I turned on my television as the Today show was repeating segments of its Sept. 11 program. Except this time, six months later, there were no sounds of my roommates shrieking in the background.

The first segment replayed was of the people gathered outside of the NBC studios before the attacks. Even at 8 a.m., the sun was shining, and the tourists smiled brightly as they held up the signs they’d made. Their eyes shone with happiness, unaware that in the next hour, the pristine day would be clouded by evil.

Seeing the sunshine replayed on television, I remembered what a beautiful sunny day it had been on Sept. 11 before the New York skyline turned gray with smoke and debris.

I remembered what it was to feel invincible as an American. I remembered what it felt like to have that change.

I left for class that morning knowing that two steel skyscrapers had crumbled to Earth with thousands of people inside of them, followed by a similar scene at the Pentagon and a plane traveling out of radar in Pennsylvania. It was difficult to go outside that morning, feeling as though the world was falling apart, and six months later, it was just as difficult to get out of bed after waking up to the same images.

In the past six months, we have seen events we didn’t know could happen in our country. The word “terrorism” became part of our everyday vocabularies. Anthrax scares, which had once seemed like something out of a far-fetched science-fiction novel, entered suburbia. We learned that planes could be weapons.

For six months, I had avoided getting on a plane. At Thanksgiving, I told my parents I’d be driving home with a friend instead of taking my usual flight home. There was no point in spending money on a flight if my friend was going to the same place anyway. At Christmas, I said it was because I had too much stuff to bring home for me to fly. I thought it was fear that kept me from getting on a plane, but it was something else.

I felt helpless. It seemed proactive not to get on a plane, as if I would be saving myself from the fate of Flights 11, 77, 175 and 93.

I couldn’t face the fact that most of the thousands of people who died on Sept. 11 didn’t do anything out of the ordinary, such as get on a plane. They just went to work at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon as they had every other day — and that was the scariest part. That is what the terrorists took from us on Sept. 11. They made it scary to live our everyday lives.

But people have begun to move on. The flags that were proudly displayed in windows and flown in front of homes are disappearing. We have begun to ignore our wounds, and since I ignored them, I thought they had begun to heal. But they haven’t.

Monday night, the country dedicated a temporary memorial to the victims of Sept. 11. Every night for a month, two towers of light will shine up to the sky in the image of the twin towers.

The lights will shine up to heaven for the victims, connecting them to the Earth — where we, as Americans, continue to struggle in a world forever changed on the day that they died.