10 Years Ago the World Changed

     Time has a funny way of distorting itself.  If you told me that ten years ago I was in grade 3 I would say that ten years has been a long time.  However, when I think about how 9/11 was ten years ago today, it just doesn't seem that long ago.  I can remember that day so well, however how accurate those memories actually are is questionable.
     I can remember hearing about some horrible disaster not long after waking up.  I can remember my best friend, Andrea, and her brother, Peter coming over before school, running across the road that separated our houses.  Seeing them before school would have been a cause for smiles and laughter, however they didn't bring those things with them.  Instead they brought news of two towers, a world away from me, having fallen down.  The next thing I knew I was lying on their parent's bed in a room that to me had always been a safe place, a place where I could hide from the noise and fear of fireworks while still able to see them on Halloween nights.  That safety shattered as I watched footage of smoke and dust and debris erupt from barely visible skyscrapers on the tiny TV in the corner.
     The school was strangely quiet in my memory, when I arrived.  In class the teacher explained to us why the flag outside was only half-way up, "at half mast", a new phrase for us eight and seven year olds.  Sadly it had nothing to do with laziness, as I had previously assumed, and instead with death, a concept that induced a heart-stopping fear in my constantly worried little eight year old mind. (And I'd be lying if I said it still didn't scare me, although for slightly different reasons now.)
     10 years ago the world changed.  It changed in many different ways and on many different levels.  And 10 years ago my world changed too.  My world shrunk.  New York, which before might as well have been on a different planet, no longer seemed so far away.  I was suddenly aware of things that happened outside my little community.  Death, a previously inconceivable concept, no longer seemed so inconceivable and no longer was something I only worried about selfishly, only concerned about my death.  It was now something that could happen to other people and people I didn't know. 
     Like most people I also experienced fear.  To my self-centered, eight year old self, my home seemed just as important as some buildings in a city in the United States.  So if someone wanted to fly a plane into the Twin Towers, it was very likely someone else was planning to fly a plane into my neighbourhood.  Unless of course they were Canadian.  Being pretty well naive and ignorant to politics and the rest of the world, as many eight year olds are, that seemed to be the only way I'd be safe.  I can remember voicing, as terrible as it was, that I hoped the hijackers (although I doubt that word was part of my vernacular at the time) were from Canada, to a girl at my daycare after school.  She told me that, secretly, she felt the same.  We both knew we shouldn't feel that way, yet we did.  I now understand that would have afforded me very little protection and I am slightly ashamed that I ever felt that way however we were scared and holding on to that hope seemed to make us feel better.