Five years ago

Five years ago, I had just started my second year at the University of Iowa. I was living in my first apartment, alone, located behind a frat house on Oakridge Avenue, which we affectionatley referred to as "The Oak Ditch Holler". There were huge trees, a ditch, a stream, and altough it got too dark at night, it made me feel safe.

It was Tuesday. I got out of bed, took a shower, and fixed myself a bowl of Cinnamon Toast Crunch with no milk because it gets soggy fast. I sat down on my purple couch and turned on the television to The Today Show. I must have been watching something on NBC the night before. Matt and Katie looked somber, but they delivered the news in the clear, steady voice that makes network anchor.

Someone was crashing planes into buildings.

When I left my apartment for class there was a helicopter circling the Old Capital overhead. When I arrived, my Professor (Margaret something) was crying at the front of the room. She was born in upstate New York and lived and wrote for twenty years in Manhattan. One of my classmates, a feminist with a bleached pixie cut, was crying with her. Her uncle worked in the World Trade Center and she couldn't get through to anyone on the phone. Details started leaking out from my other classmates: it wasn't an accident; all flights are grounded; thousands of people are dead. Two thousand seven hundred and forty nine, I learned today.

I spent the rest of the day in the student union, huddled around big screen tv's with strangers.

I didn't think about the future or what any of it meant because it was too soon. No one realized that it was far too late.