9/11, Ten years later

I was nine years old. I was in music class and we had a routine fire drill. After the drill, we left music class early and went back to our regular classes. Sitting in my desk, my teacher turned the TV on to the news and we watched... The first tower had been hit already but we watched as the second was hit. At only nine years old, I didn't know what was going on.

Now, at 19, I find it hard to believe its been a decade... I remember being terrified even though I wasn't even near New York.

A few years later, I went to New York. My Girl Scout troop and I went to Ground Zero. I was almost 12. We were mostly silent as our tour guide showed us the site. The new building was being built as well as the Memorial museum.

Either way, I understood more and more about 9/11 as each anniversary came and went. And now, a decade after the worst day in American history, I mourn the lives that were lost, even though I knew no one there. I celebrate us as a nation, one once again, in a time of pain but a time of happiness too as we celebrate the lives we did not lose and remember the ones we did.

Either way, the nation will never be the same again.