I wanted to share my 9/11 story as someone who comes from a small town in the exburbs of NYC.

I was 11 years old, in 6th grade. I had just moved up from elementary school into middle school and being that it was only our 2nd week of school I was still adjusting. We no longer stayed in one classroom with one teacher, we instead moved from class to class to learn our various subjects.

The school day started at 7:35, before the highjackers even boarded their planes. As the morning progressed I was in my math class by the time both towers were struck. I remember the phone in the classroom ringing and my teacher stepping out into the hallway, the phone cord stretching around the door frame. She came back in an entirely different woman, in the following days I learned her husband was FDNY. He survived but my teacher took almost 6 months off to attend funerals and help the widows and families. Her husband was the one who called her in the classroom.

Throughout the day the classroom phone continued to ring and with each call another classmate was being picked up from school. None of our teachers ever told us what was going on, out of fear students would panic because many had parents that worked in the city. I do recall asking another student at lunch if he knew what was going on and he said that there was a bombing at the twin towers. I remembered being told of the 1993 bombing, so I assumed it was on the same level of damage.

When I boarded my school bus home there was only about a third of the normal number of students. We were not allowed to get off at our stop unless an adult was there to pick us up. The school was worried many kids would go home to an empty home because their parents were stuck trying to get out of the city, or worse.

As the days passed we learned that a total of 6 men from my town were killed, all of them FDNY. I knew a couple of their children and remember welling up with tears when they finally came back to school. Our town would go on to build a beautiful monument to those men, and to all those who persished on that day. 9/11 is always a weird day for me. I’m not really sure if it’s because I feel it differently as a New Yorker, or if it is because my town lost good men, or if it is because we used to go to the city on friday or saturday nights just to have dinner. The twin towers were always my favorite part of the NYC skyline.

I ended up finishing up my graduate degree at Pace University in Lower Manhattan in 2015. I would commute into the city on the PATH train, which comes into Lower Manhattan directly below where the towers stood. Even then it was a make shift station with plywood walkways and construction barriers. I watched as the Freedom Tower grew with each passing day until it finally topped out. I remember when I got off the train towards one of my final class days and commuters were directed into the new World Trade Center Station in the Oculus. The plywood walls we were used to now became beautiful white structural ribs that stretched up into the air.

As someone who was born in 1990 my childhood was split between what life was like before and after 9/11, with that day being the pivot point. A lot of my political beliefs stem from what happened that day, what caused it, who caused it, and how the government reacted to it. I still live in the same town, every 9/11 feels heavier than any other day of the year. There still is a sense of a lack of justice for the victims and their families, and in many ways an injustice because as a response a lot of our liberties have been curtailed. For me there is still a quiet anger about all of it.

I’ll never forget 9/11, I’ll never forget the 6 men from my town who perished, I’ll never forget their families, and I’ll never forgive those who have actively prevented those families from receiving justice.