A detour into after
The cul de-sac where I grew up splits two houses into the road. My childhood home lies perfectly in the middle, but muscle memory and patterns drove me in one direction.
Two paths diverged, as they say, and I always went right. Past my best friend's house, past the neighbors we dropped off along the way, the loop that felt safe and predictable.
But on that Tuesday in early September 2001, I went left. I was trying to see if it was somehow shorter, to increase my efficiency and get home faster.
As I came down the hill, I saw my mother waiting outside, leaning against the Japanese maple tree that no longer exists. My aunt's car was in the driveway, unusual for a weekday afternoon. She was supposed to fly to Boston that morning — the city from which two of the planes departed. We were told then that something had happened.
At school that day, nothing had been said. Teachers carried on as if it were an ordinary Tuesday. No announcements or guidance. We heard the last bell and departed home in our normal patterns, unaware.
Inside my living room at home, the television showed smoke and collapse, the kind of images that don't make sense until someone explains them. My aunt sat stiffly on an ottoman, her face lit by the screen. Then she turned to me, her eyes locking on mine, and said with unnerving certainty: "This day will change your life. You will remember a before and after this day, and nothing will be the same again."
Even at nine, I understood. I had always been called an old soul, but this was different. This was the first time I felt the world itself pressing its weight into my shoulders.
Childhood, with all its ease and unknowing, was already slipping out of reach.
My hometown is a commuter town, forty-five minutes by Metro-North to Grand Central Station. Almost everyone's parents took the train south each morning. On September 11, not all of them came back.
Three close friends of mine since kindergarten were Emilys — a very popular name for 1992. One of them saw their dad on the 60 Minutes footage, covered in ash, staggering away from the chaos. Another's worked in finance in 5 World Trade, the building between the towers, but was hiking Mount Kilimanjaro that week, spared only by chance. The third never saw her father again.
In the late '90s and early 2000s, parenting wasn't as watchful as it is now. We weren't hovered over; we roamed freely and were expected to adapt. Our school held a gym assembly on support, but what I remembered most was the silence. We were children watching other children lose their parents and yet no one quite had the words.
The air felt thick with absence. Something had broken, and the grownups didn't know how to fix it.
In the years that followed, we all grew up in the shadow of that day. Wars began, and though I didn't fully understand, I absorbed the tone of certainty from the adults around me. The U.S. was going to war because of what had been done to us. That was the logic.
At first, it was collective mourning. Then came the surge of nationalism, wars waged with too little questioning, and suspicion cast on Muslim and Arab communities. Nuances sharpened. When I finally discovered the identities of the terrorists, most from Saudi Arabia, I felt a sudden jolt of betrayal: How did we get it so wrong?
By then it was too late. Convincing the youth to give up their lives for this became part of the national story. Eighteen-year-olds enlisting with conviction, believing they were defending our country. Hundreds of thousands of civilians killed abroad. Our military industrial complex swelling, while innocence, theirs and ours, was consumed.
When I moved to Washington, I still thought of 9/11 primarily as a New York story, but here the scars are written into the government itself. Friends who grew up in the area carry their own version of the story: watching the smoke rise across the Potomac, the landscape punctured with Pentagon torn open.
The effects of that day are everywhere: the Patriot Act, the Department of Homeland Security, TSA lines that snake endlessly. The normalization of surveillance. A whole vocabulary of vigilance and foreign policy that continues to ripple outward two decades on.
For me, Reading Politico's oral history, We're the Only Plane in the Sky, has become a kind of psalm. The recollections of government officials moving through chaos, each detail a reminder of how fragile the scaffolding of power really was.
And in the years since? We've built an entire infrastructure as if it were indestructible.
Living in abroad, I saw how differently the story had been told. During my master's degree in international relations, classmates outright asked me whether I believed that the U.S. could have orchestrated the attacks, their way of making sense of American power. In Argentina, the activist Hebe de Bonafini, famous for her protests against the dictatorship that disappeared thousands of her own country's children declared many in the world must have felt "avenged" in the wake of 9/11 due to the cruelty the U.S. had inflicted elsewhere.
To hear someone whose life had been shaped by state violence speak of American tragedy in those terms was jarring, even if her logic — that violence breeds violence — was not unfamiliar. It revealed the stark gap between how we as Americans remember 9/11, as the day that everything changed, and how others saw it: as one more chapter in a much longer history of power, arrogance, and reprisal.
The dissonance comes in how memory and history have diverged. My memory is a single room, a child's body live footage she didn't yet understand. But history grew from that seed into something sprawling: a tree of wars, bureaucracies, and security measures, its roots twisting through nearly every corner of Washington. I hold both at once, seed and tree, and they rarely align.
24 years later, I've noticed the way we remember that day has shifted. It feels quieter. A low hum underneath Washington's machinery.
It was perhaps the last national tragedy that everyone agreed was a national tragedy — unlike today's mass shootings, where grief splinters into debate over guns, politics, and identity. In 2001 there was no disagreement over what happened: the argument came later, about what we did with it.
A meaningless choice on any other Tuesday became a marker in my memory: a symbol of how the world itself veered off course.
The cul-de-sac, by design, is a loop. You return to the same place, but the walk is never the same. Each September, I find myself circling that path, my mother in the yard, my aunt's car in the driveway, her words a premonition.
Everyone has their own version of this story. Mine began on a quiet Connecticut neighborhood, in a living room where childhood ended, and in the long years since, on a road that keeps bending still.
Thank you for reading this memory with me. I write this as a way of remembering, but also of listening. If you feel like sharing your story, my inbox is always open.