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I worked every Tuesday morning before class, so I was up getting breakfast when our house mom told me that a plane hit the WTC. My first thought, which I will probably always remember, was, "What kind of dumbass flew right into a skyscraper?" Then I walked into the chapter room in time to see the second plane hit. I called work, told them I wasn't coming in, and was glued to the TV.
Then a message from our mayor came on telling us that they were evacuating downtown Cleveland because one of the hijacked airplanes had just entered Cleveland airspace (which was flight 93 turning around). Meanwhile we were trying to find one of my sisters who was leaving for Chicago - no one could remember if she flew out that morning or the next day. When flight 93 crashed in PA, one of my sisters was frantically trying to get a hold of her mom who lived in the area. Another sister was trying to locate her older sister who had a meeting in the WTC that morning (luckily it had been cancelled the night before). People were trying to contact friends and family in NYC and DC and everywhere, and the rest of us were glued to the TV.
The University *finally* cancelled classes at 1 or 2 pm, but it's not like anyone was going anyway. So the out of house sisters came over for dinner and we all got into this huge argument over whether the attacks were justified - we have a couple sisters from the Middle East and were trying to express the views of the people in the region, but at the moment, none of us were the most receptive to hearing alternate views. All I remember was a lot of shock, a lot of crying, and a lot of screaming. Then somehow, we got through everything.
The one other thing I will always remember is the sound of the first jet I heard after flights resumed. Everyone around me looked up at the exact same time, and all I could wonder was how I had never noticed how noisy they were before. And I haven't really noticed any since.
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