You might read a lot of articles like this one this week. Everyone has their story to tell, but I’ve got to tell mine as well. This date has been burned into our minds since that fateful day 11 years ago.

We all remember where we were when we heard the news. I remember waking up that morning, a junior in high school, at about 6 AM. I usually took a shower then got on the bus around 645 every morning with my fellow co-host Chris. I always had my radio alarm on at 104.7 FM to get me up in the morning, and most times it was nothing more than DJ babble, background noise that I never really listened to. Except this morning I woke up to hear:

Again, this is breaking news, a plane has crashed into the World Trade Center. We don’t have details at the moment but it is confirmed that a plane has crashed into tower one of the World Trade Center.

Mom came into the room to wake me up, but I was already wide eyed and scared. “Mom, a plane just dive bombed the World Trade Center.”

“What!?” she said baffled, she herself had just woken up.

We both went to the living room to turn on the TV, seeing the smoldering hole that was in the famous tower. I stood there dumbfounded as my father said to me, “Everything just changed.”

I didn’t want to go to school. I didn’t want to get on the bus and go about the normal routine, I just wanted to sit there and listen to everything that was happening as it was happening. But, as there was no threat to us in Phoenix, we went to school as normal. Since this was before the major proliferation of cell phones, we were completely shut off from all news on the 45 minute bus ride. From the time I left until I got to school, another plane hit the tower, the towers collapsed, the Pentagon was hit, and a plane had crashed in Pennsylvania.

It was impossible to tell what reality was and what fiction was from what people at school were telling me. I couldn’t believe that the towers fell when a classmate told me. I literally said that it wasn’t possible, and asked if they were positive. When that was confirmed and I subsequently found out about the pentagon, I started to freak out a little. What was next? Were there more attacks coming? Was Phoenix a target? Was every major city a target? Who was next?

As school started, some teachers just let us watch TV for news on the events, and others just wanted to continue on with their normal lesson. Maybe they were scared, maybe they didn’t want to frighten us, I don’t know, but I do remember that September 11, 2001 was the only sunny day that I didn’t go out to play football or Frisbee at lunch while I was at Brophy. I went to the library where they had set up a projector screen with CNN on it. Most of my classmates were there. We just couldn’t pull ourselves away.

I was fortunate that all I had to live with was the fear of the unknown. I can’t imagine facing the choice that the people in those towers had: Burn to death or fall to your death with no third option. I feel like I had nothing but tearful pride to say that the passengers of United Airlines flight 93 were fellow Americans, who saw a threat to the nation and took it out with no regard for their lives, only their country.

This morning, Courtney and I carpooled to work, and while I drove, listening to the radio coverage of a memorial,

I was silent. I felt that had I spoken, I would have tears would be spilled. Even to this day I still remember the honor I felt in the way all of America banded together. The combination of that day and the aftermath of patriotism that came from that day still makes me choke up.

Did everything change? Yes and no. Obviously we have different requirements for security on airplanes, September 11^th has become “Patriot Day,” and everyone obviously remembers what happened that day. But a lot of the things that we argued about and did on our day to day lives continue. Republican and Democrats are still for and against the same things, people still argue about their sports teams, the grass is still green and the sky is still blue. Not too much changed for me, as I didn’t know anyone in New York or Washington that day, but every time I see the picture of the TwinTowers protruding into the clouds in July of 2001, I think about that day, and hope that we can be that united once again, this time without a national tragedy.