The Day I Lost My Innocence
This month marks the 16 year anniversary of the 9/11 terror attacks. Every year, the event seems to be less and less marked by the media: this year, I barely noticed it in publications at all.
But it didn’t completely pass me by; I was distinctly aware of it. The 11th September 2001 is a date that I will never forget, because it was the day that I, along with so many other children, lost my innocence.
I was 7 years old. I had had an ordinary day at school and at 3:30 pm I took myself out to the school playground as I did every day, and waited to be taken home.
I can remember my friend’s mother coming towards us — she was taking three of us home. As she got closer, I could see utter pain and panic written across her face; she was almost crying. I had never seen an adult in that sort of traumatised state before. She ushered us out of the school gates and threw open the car doors. Only once we were all sat inside with the doors shut, did I hear it for the first time — that sentence that cut my childhood in half:
‘The towers in New York - A plane has hit one of the Twin Towers!’
She was hysterical, but none of us said anything. We couldn’t comfort her — how could we even understand what she had said? We were 7 years old. But I remember agonising over it the whole way home, trying to pull apart what she had meant and how I was supposed to feel. I didn’t cry, but I was confused, afraid and wholly unbalanced.
When I arrived home, my parents were hit with my persistent questioning:
‘Why would they hit a building? Were people inside the building? Were there people on the plane? Who was flying the plane? Will the pilot be in trouble? Where is New York?’
I can’t remember how my parents responded, but I imagine that they found it tremendously difficult to have this conversation with me. Parents devote their lives to protecting their children from all of the horrors that our world is home to, making it their mission to preserve their innocence for as long as possible. But the truth is that however hard a parent fights to protect their children, they can be no match for the unpredictable, powerful nature of evil which lurks around every corner. It jumps out when we least expect and feels no shame when children are among its targets.
11th September 2001 was the first time that I was exposed to evil: it was, as my Dad later put it, the day that I lost my innocence.
And yet, even after I’d sat in front of the TV and seen clips of fire, people jumping out of buildings and falling to their death, screaming New Yorkers and images of the first plane, my parents still tried to protect me; they desperately tried to claw at my innocence and convince me that it was all going to be okay. And it really wasn’t okay.
Although I was glued to the screen and visibly distressed, my Dad insisted that I went to my tennis lesson as normal. Whilst I was on the tennis court getting stressed over something as trivial as my weak backhand, he sat in the cafe in front of the TV, and watched the second plane hit the second tower.
I had already been changed irrevocably: I had already seen the devastation caused by the first plane and had the reality that the world isn’t all rainbows and smiles forced upon me. But I am so grateful that I never actually saw the exact moments that the planes hit the Twin Towers, because that would have been too much for a 7 year old to stomach.
On the day (and for years after), I was completely obsessed with the attacks. Had my Dad not made me go to tennis that evening and treated it as any normal day for my sake, I undoubtedly would have sat in front of the TV and seen that second plane hit the building, live.
Thanks for protecting me big man.
