9/11: A Short Story

To a seven year old me, the looming grey monolith before me wasn’t intimidating, it was downright nightmarish. Maybe I had traumatized myself by watching “Why Airplanes Crash” the night before, or maybe I was scared of leaving everything I knew behind, but the site of the glass encased, dull concrete Airport made me want to turn around and run. And thinking back to that day in 2009, I probably could have. My Aunt and Grandma had stayed up the whole night packing and cleaning and reassuring me and my Sister that yes, Florida was fun, and no, the Airplane wasn’t going to crash and burn and consequently turn into a steaming pile of ash and dismembered corpses. They were both exhausted, and if me or my sister tried to turn back and ran around the parking lot, they would’ve surrendered and let us be. Regardless of what

I thought, I stayed calm.

I charged ahead into the airport, ready to fly to my new home, when i was struck with the sudden realization that I hadn’t packed something very important to me, my blanket.

Now, it almost seems like a cliche to say that I had my own special blanket when I was seven, but I sincerely believed that the blanket I owned was the very center of my universe. It was old, my Grandma had it for years before she gave it to me, and I treasured it. It was a pale sky-blue, a reminiscent of its original royal blue, and had tiny pink flowers scattered throughout it. I had agreed to leave it behind if I got a new one, so I begrudgingly pushed all thoughts about my blanket aside and carried on. The airport experience wasn’t bad, but it was slow. My Aunt had worked in that airport for years, and with every checkpoint we passed we faced more and more of her ex-coworkers, which were… “talkative” to say the least. After

catching up with the entire airport we finally made it to the seating area, and waited. I had convinced my grandma to buy me some gum on the pretext that it would help popping our ears at the high altitudes, and I very, very “secretly” stuck four sticks of gum in my mouth and had to spit them out. I vividly remember when my sister smiled at me when they called our row on the plane, and I also recall grabbing four sets of complimentary headphones from a bin while getting on the airplane, which I was once again forced to leave behind. The flight itself wasn’t very interesting, although I would look out the window roughly every 20 seconds and gawk at the assortment of tiny islands. I remember naming one “Dorito” because it was a small triangle, and asking what the lines of sand and colored algae were, but apart from that I wasn’t at all interested in the plane ride. Things got interesting however, when we began our descent into Florida. From the view of the plane I noticed two things. One, there were no mountains. Coming from Puerto Rico, a very mountainous and uneven island, I had expected to see mountains everywhere, or at least some, low-lying hills. But flying over the area revealed that there were no mountains, and that the homes and rivers were all organized into dainty, squares. I was shocked, I hadn’t given it much thought, I thought that I was upgrading to a Puerto Rico 2.0, not some strange, new world. Stepping off the plane was strange, everyone spoke English, and everything seemed different. There was A.C for once (that boggled my mind, I had never expected for every building to have it, I was used to being cooled off from the sweltering heat by fans), and it was cold. Was it culture shock? Yes, I felt like a bumble bee just walking around and following my aunt. From the airport we went to the parking lot where we got her car and me and my sister got our first real look at our new home. I wasn’t impressed. Everything was swamp land, I almost fell asleep a few minutes into the ride. It wasn’t until we got to the residential areas that I finally sat up in my seat and looked around me. Everything was beautiful, the homes seemed like they were straight out of a Hollywood movie, and there were palmtrees all around. We finally made it to our home and my sister and I ran up to our rooms in glee. It’s an experience that I’ll never forget, no matter how scared I was in the beginning.