A couple years ago, I finally blogged about that day, too. I still remember it like it was yesterday. My wife and I had just recently started trying to conceive. I remember thinking that I no longer wanted to bring kids into such a monumentally effed up world. I also remember thinking it might be time to reenlist in the Army.

I'm glad I didn't reenlist, and I'm glad we decided to bring our two children into the world. (I'm not glad that it's still so monumentally effed up, tho.)

I was in high school - it was my first year, actually, by our system, and I was a sophomore. I was sitting in a class - don't remember which one - and suddenly the phone in the room rang. The teacher took the call, then quietly informed the class that something big was going on, and she was going to turn on the TV (every room had a TV that could be tuned to a couple specific stations and to a CCTV station that the school operated) for a minute.
We all thought that was incredibly weird. And yet at first, we thought it was just a point as to how awesome this teacher was.
Then we saw it.
At the time, the first tower had just been hit. We watched the plane fly into the second tower. Classes came to a standstill, nobody moved when the bells rang, and we watched. We watched the whole damn thing, a high school full of terrified kids, until the principal made a sudden announcement over the PA system that the school's internet was being turned off for the rest of the day and TVs were to be turned off and remain that way. And until I got home that day at about 2:30, all I knew was that something insanely awful had happened, and that people from another country were at fault, but I didn't really understand WHY.
It took years for me to really, truly understand the hatred behind the attacks, and the level of religious extremism involved. At the time, I thought I really had a solid grasp on the world, but not surprisingly my rather narrow-minded view was nothing compared to the truth. Only now am I beginning to really accept what happened, how earth-shattering it is, and the intents and purposes behind the attack.

Goosebumps. It's eery how almost everyone had the same, yet different experience.

I'll start with the aside: I was doing those same stairs back in 2001. ::waves from the past:: My 42 year old self wonders how my 32 year old self had that kind of energy.

Living in LA, the whole thing was so surreal. It had already happened long before I woke up and how I managed to avoid any news until work still baffles me. For years after, the first thing I'd do in the morning was turn on the tv.

Thank you for sharing your account. Those of us who were on the west coast that day felt very helpless. We were afraid and worried and panicked, but we definitely felt the 2500-3000 miles between us and those directly affected. In some ways, that feeling of being useless was very difficult to reconcile.

I was in high school, too -- a junior. I was sitting in math class when they made the announcement - plain, and matter-of-fact, like it was nothing more than a lunch change. I suppose they didn't want anyone to freak out. There were no TVs in the math wing, so I didn't really get the gravity of what was happening until I got to my next class. The TVs weren't working properly to get cable in that class, so we all went down to the library to watch, and got there just after the second tower fell.

I don't remember a lot from the rest of the day, but I do remember that there was a lot of watching TV, and not a lot of class. And that I borrowed a friend's cell phone at lunch to try to call a friend who lived in NYC and see if she was okay, and the school administrator caught me in the hallway with the cell phone and confiscated it. When I got back to class, I told my teacher (who used to threaten to throw any cell phone she saw in the classroom out the third story window into the no-student-access courtyard), and she handed me hers and told me to go to the teachers' lounge and make the call. My friend was safe - she lived a little further uptown and had watched the towers fall from her fire escape - but I wouldn't know that until that night; it was almost impossible to get calls through to NYC that day, and it took her a while to get her hands on internet access and check in.

When I moved to NYC for college a few years later, one of the friends I made was several years older than me, and had lived here during 9/11. She would tell stories sometimes about that day, how she was working as a nanny and was taking the bus cross-town to pick up one of the kids from school, but the traffic was jammed and her cell wouldn't pick up signal in the park to call the school and let them know she'd be late. Total strangers on the bus just handed her their phones to try, but nobody had signal that day - some of the biggest cell towers were on top of the WTC. She also helped with the clean-up, and one day she handed me a plastic film box with a rock inside it. I asked her what it was, and she said it was a piece of the World Trade Center - she'd taken a few during the clean up (apparently a lot of people who helped clean up took small pieces away), and she was giving this one to me. It has made it safely through several moves, and is still in that film box, on my bookshelf.

i was on the air that afternoon, on a smooth jazz station in salt lake city. verrrry subdued. verrrry stiff. verrrry mellow.

the one thing i relished was the quiet skies. i'd "heard" nothing like it before, all aircraft having been grounded for several days. i escaped the crushing reality and found some peace for a couple of hours on a trail at the top of millcreek canyon that day.

I was in college and woke up right after the first plane hit the tower. I spent the day with my family and then the following days with the family of my boyfriend, they lost a sister/aunt in the 2nd tower. I watched him pack and un-pack his car several times, ready to drive up there to help and then being so grief stricken that he couldn't move. Feels like yesterday.

I was working a split shift those days, going in at 10AM. I use the timer on my TV as an alarm clock, and it came on at 8:30, tuned to Good Morning America as it always was in those days (aside: show went to hell after both Gibson and Sawyer left).

I woke up just in time to hear, before I had opened my eyes, "Oh my God, another one!" or words to that effect - the second plane had just hit. I was instantly wide awake and on full alert with my mind racing - "What's happening? Where? HERE? What do I do??"

I sat on the edge of the bed dumbfounded. I called my boss to see whether I had to go in. I shouldn't have had to but he was a mean unfeeling wretch of a man and said yes, I had to show up. So I went. Nothing got done but I was there which was all he cared about.

I had a 13" TV and a rabbit-ear antenna in my office and turned it on to ABC. Whatever this was, I wanted to hear it from Peter Jennings and Charlie Gibson. People wandered in and out of my office, watching. No one said a word. We just stared.

Through all that, I held it together, but then I flipped over to the NBC affiliate. NBC was showing footage of the people jumping out of the towers. They had pretty sophisticated cameras and got close enough that anyone who knew those people would have recognized them. That nearly made me throw up -- not the jumping, which is horrible enough to contemplate, but that someone might turn on their TV to see what was happening and recognize someone they love in the very last seconds of his/her life.

That did it. I closed my office door, put my face in my hands, and quietly (?) lost it for probably 15 minutes.

I had friends who lived/worked in DC/VA and one at the WTC and one a NYPD officer. All were found to be alright although it took several days to find out for sure.

One of the flight attendants on 93 that crashed in PA was the sister of a man I worked with. I didn't know him well at all but it did bring it home.

Thank God I had moved back to the same city as my nuclear family. We stayed very close to one another for many days after that. Mom and Dad spoke more than once of how it reminded them of Pearl Harbor.

Any American flags for sale were sold out immediately. The only one I had was a 5"x7" on a wood stick and I put it in the window. I still have it - it's clipped to the wall of my cube about 2 feet from where I'm sitting now.

There were also businesses giving away American flag decals and I had one of those on my car. There was something comforting in the days afterward about seeing all those flags -- a reminder that we were none of us in it alone.

I live in Iowa, but at the time I was on a business trip to the office in Florida. I was meeting my fellow commuters in the lobby of the hotel for breakfast before we headed to the office. I walked in and everyone was glued to the TV. I sat down as they replayed the first plane flying into the first tower. I said 'wow. someone is so fired'. And then ten minutes later we all sat and watched another plane hit the second tower. We watched it stunned for quite awhile and then headed to the office. No one at the office could quite focus so our plan for meetings and productivity ended. Another co-worker was originally from New York and spent most of the day trying to locate family, which she did eventually. The rest of us planned how we were going to get home to Iowa and Oregon without getting on a plane. We kept our rental car, and took turns driving, first to Iowa where I got off and they went on to Oregon after visiting with family. It was so bizarre to watch, and to watch it over and over and over was torturous, but none of us could look away. My kids also will never really know about that day or what it has meant to our security since. Part of me is glad for that, part of me is nervous for them.

I live in St. John's, Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada. There is an hour and a half time difference between New York and St. John's, so I was already at work on that morning when our director of communications came striding out of his office towards the board room where there was a TV at the time.

My co-workers and I followed him in, curious as to what would make him move that fast with such a stricken look on his face. I arrived in the room just in time to see the second plane hit. It was utterly unbelievable. It looked like a movie. It had to be special effects. That couldn't really have happened. Could it? We didn't get much work done that morning.

I was involved in a production of "Evita" at the time and at lunchtime I had an appointment at the theatre costume bank to pick out a hat and jewellery for my costume. The costume bank staff had a small portable TV tuned to a news channel. It was completely, utterly FREAKING SURREAL to be dressing up for make-believe while watching the coverage of the tragedy in New York City.

When I went home for lunch, I searched for any bit of news I could find online. I bounced from CNN to CBC to BBC to ABC… and around and around. My mind raced, considering possible consequences. I found myself thinking that the Americans would now bomb the perpetrators, some other major power would side with the perpetrators and bomb North American targets and it would only be a matter of time before nuclear weapons were launched until I could barely breathe.

When they closed American airspace, there were something like 240 aircraft in or nearing Canadian airspace. 38 of them were diverted to Gander airport, 400 kms from here. St. John's airport accepted 21 planes. Only Halifax, Nova Scotia and Vancouver British Columbia accepted that many. Surely we'd be a target for retaliation for this. One well-aimed missile could take out lots of Americans and punish us as well. I figured this was it. Armageddon.

I finally had to talk myself down off the ledge by telling myself that there was absolutely nothing I could do about this. For the moment, I was safe, my children were safe and I would just have to handle whatever happened next, regardless.

We had a rehearsal that night, which began with the director having the 130-plus cast and crew assemble on stage for two minutes of silence. One of our cast members had gone to Arizona on a business trip with her husband and they were now stranded there. It felt somehow wrong to be rehearsing a musical at a time like this, but then I remembered how they had kept the theatres and movies going during the world wars and what comfort it had been to people then, so maybe it was justifiable now, too.

After rehearsal, I found it so hard to get in my car and go home to an empty house. I'm divorced and had joint custody of my daughters at the time and they were with their father that week. It seemed like everyone else in the cast had family to go home to. I found myself standing at my car, watching other people drive away and wishing so much that I could go home with one of them.

I was very lucky in that I lost no one in the towers, the Pentagon or on United Airlines flight 93, but one of my actor friends was in New York City on 9/11. It changed him. He won't talk about his experiences. I have no idea where he was that morning or what he witnessed. Whatever it was traumatized him. Every September 11th, he has a 'dark day' and we all know to leave him in peace.

I was going through a time of personal crisis during this time of national crisis and can't open up one set of memories without opening the other. It's difficult to watch movies where there are explosions because now there's a ton of paper falling just like when the towers went down; a scene that was played over and over for days.

But the first anniversary is one I'd like to share. Employees at my job were allowed to honor the moment of silence by standing outside in a circle around the American flag that is outside our office building. There wasn't a plan so people were sort of mulling in a circle and we heard the screech of tires as a semi-truck passing by stopped hard as did the two cars behind him (they didn't really have a choice). The man came running very fast yelling for us to wait. He had left his semi in the middle of a very busy road. He was sobbing as he reached our circle and as he and the ladies arrived we all joined hands. It was such a hopeful moment and we were united in a manner that had never happened at my job before nor since. And suddenly there was a plan and people were flooding out of the building and stepping into the circle joining hands, 200 people strong. Wait...203.

I didn't get to speak with the man but I heard him say that he didn't want to honor the moment alone in his truck and was so grateful we were there. I don't think he realized the gift he gave to us.

(I'm sorry for the length, it just kept coming...)

I was at work in a law firm in DC. One of my best friends, who also worked there, called me and told me that two planes had hit the World Trade Center. I remember I was just baffled, how on earth could that have happened? Where terrorism is the first thing we would think now, at the time it wasn't even on my radar.

I went into one of my attorneys' offices and told him, and he turned on his TV. We watched the second building fall.

There were rumors and unverified reports all day of bombs at different DC locations. My firm closed early, but I actually worked late on a filing. I don't think any of us were quite in our right minds.

I rode the Metro to work then, and there is a Pentagon stop. It does not lead directly into the building but is underground nearby. That day and for many days afterwards, we rode through it but didn't stop. I would cry at least a little on most of those days. That first day, you could see the smoke from one of the the above-ground stations near it.

As bad as that was, I'm glad I wasn't driving to work then (I do now). The route I take goes right past the side of the Pentagon that was hit. A co-worker at the time was stuck in traffic there and saw it happen.

In the days that followed, tanks with armed soldiers were all over the streets of DC. In my walk from the Metro to my office building, I would pass two or three.

In a way it seems like forever ago, and in another way I can't believe it has been ten years.

My now husband and I were supposed to leave on a red eye flight that night from Los Angeles to go to Rhode Island where we were getting married that Saturday the 15th. We had 150 people planned on coming to our wedding, and alot of them from all over the country. I was running on a track behind my apartment building, listening to KROQ. The DJs were on vacation and they were playing best of show and I knew something was wrong when the news guy and the entertainment guy were talking. Then I heard what they were talking about. I got a huge knot in my stomach, all I could do was continue to run. I went back to my apartment half an hour later to find Andy sitting on the couch in a panic. He didn't know where I was and got worried when he got a call from a family member about what was happening. It was such a shock and horror. We sat there glued to the TV for most of the morning. The even worst part for us, was as this horrible thing was going on and so many people were dying we had a huge wedding planned that we had no idea what was going to happen to. It made me feel guilty and selfish to even think about it. There was no way for us to make it back in time or for other people to get there. Fortunately for us, all the vendors were more than understanding and we were able to move the entire wedding to October 12th instead. Some people didn't make it, but most did. Now every September 15th we celebrate our "almost wedding", and 10 years later it doesn't really matter that everything got moved. Our lives did not change that dramatically. Not as much as it did for thousands of people that day and really every person in this country. I consider myself so fortunate that the only thing I lost that day was my original wedding date. It still makes me so sick to see video and pictures from that day. So sad.

Eerie is a good word for it. My sister/roomate woke me up - it was just after 5 a.m. in Alaska - shouting that we were being bombed. We both stood and stared at the TV. Shrieked as the second plane hit. I went to classes and wondered what the hell I was doing there. No one was talking about it - just walking around in shock.

Also, two of my other sisters were stuck in Canada. They weren't allowed to cross the border for days. And my brother-in-law, who was supposed to fly and meet them in Seattle, had to stay with us until planes were allowed to start flying again.

It was so strange.

Hopefully without getting too lengthy I will share my memory as well:

I was in college and rushing that morning, because I had my first critique of the semester in my pre-press & production class. As I purchased last-minute supplies for my project at the store off-campus I heard the girl at the counter telling someone on the phone about the first plane. It only sort of registered in my head, thinking "what? how weird."

I arrived to class early, and by the time people began trickling in we were getting more details. Instead of our scheduled critique, we spent the next two hours glued to the radio and huddled around a couple of laptops, trying desperately to get more information as we battled the overloaded news network websites.

However, most notably, at some point while it all unfolded I went to the pay phone downstairs to call my dad. Through a shaking voice, "Well, I was just going to call and wish you a happy birthday, daddy." "I appreciate that sweetie, it's just not a very happy day." "I know, daddy, I know", as I broke down into sobs.