On 9/11/11

Ten years ago right now, I was in a hotel room on the Sunshine Coast of Australia breaking up with my boyfriend. We were on holiday before I started a job at a bigger newspaper. We were breaking up because I'd kissed someone else. Or rather, that was the "reason". The fact was that I'd known all along I didn't want to marry him. As an early-20-something, though, I hadn't realised that was a serious consideration. So, almost three years into our relationship, I'd forced the issue both for him and myself. (Not my highest point, granted.)

We'd just come back to our hotel room from a painful dinner at a mediocre Irish pub, trying to avoid a painful truth. In an effort to distract ourselves from what we knew was inevitable, or to find some kind of way to avoid the mess in front of us, we turned on the television. Among the usual drab late-Tuesday-night fare, Channel 10 had interrupted the broadcast to report a strange accident in New York City. One of the World Trade Center towers was on fire, and it was thought a plane had crashed into it.

Ground Zero, 2006.

As we - the newscasters, the people on those New York streets, us in our beachside hotel room in coastal Queensland - watched, a second plane came into view. It seemed to bank slightly. And then it crashed into the South Tower.

I think I uttered something like "Oh my god" as the newscasters grappled to explain what they'd seen (and, I guess, not to swear). I looked up at my boyfriend, my mind and heart racing. "This is war," I whispered. 

 We like to tell ourselves that the world before September 11 was peaceful and innocent. We could waltz onto planes. The biggest danger of leaving bags unattended was having them stolen. But the reality is, that "peace" was an anomoly made of selective blindness. The world was rife with battle. Australia had peacekeepers in some of the most wartorn places on the globe. Foreign policy had for years gone astray, led by at-times willfully ignorant US policy. It was a house of cards built on secrets and betrayal.

Black street signs were later installed in the area where the Twin Tower debris fell.

And for all that purported pre-9/11 innocence, I recognised an act of war when I saw one. While I was horrified, devastated, shocked and scared, I wasn't actually too surprised. Human history being as savage as it is, and world dynamics being as fragile as they were, something was bound to happen. I just don't think anyone expected this. 

We stayed up late that night, largely silent with bursts of worry and speculation. We watched the towers fall. We cried for the people in the towers, in the Pentagon, on Flight 93. And I fought to keep out of my mind's eye an image of my boyfriend donning fatigues to go to fight a foreign war. We reluctantly went to sleep, hoping by morning to find out who was behind it, what it all meant.

The relationship didn't end that night, but it did soon afterwards. In a world rocked to its core, we clung to each other for stability, for normalcy, maybe for a bit of blind hope. Eventually, though, we learned one of the most brutal facts about mass tragedy: Life does go on.  

On a fence covered with memorial tiles in downtown New York City, in 2007.

As for what it all meant, we're still working that out now, 10 years later. It seems that the world was forced to grow up and face ugly truths that day: That secrets and underhandedness have repercussions; that motives for terrible acts can be complicated and ugly, but they can also be based on a kernel of truth; that retaliation is a two-edged sword; that a war of attrition will scar both sides.

We've moved on, as a world, as nations, as individuals, but the battle within us all continues. Surrounded by a new world of security, fracturing government policy and rising intolerance, it is up to individuals to rise above base instincts of suspicion and blame, anger and guilt. In the wreckage of 9/11, we must strive to find a place of unified humanity so that the generations that come after us inherit something to celebrate, rather than mourn.