September 11, 2001… I woke up in Athens, Greece. I was staying in my cousins bedroom while he was off with his girlfriend. I had been in Greece since August 6th to see my mom who had moved there since the summer of 1999.
The morning was normal, cars and noise, bustle all over. Not sure where my aunt possibly to take a nap. We were sitting in the den watching TV, my cousin Maria and her cousin Mike. It was so simple and normal. And then I don’t even remember what we were watching. But they interrupted the programming to get to show us the first plane crash.
I’m on the other side of the world. My boyfriend of 4 years is at home. My dad, sis, my brother in law all there. I was confused at what I was watching and then there live I saw it. I saw something that I would never come to properly remove from my soul… I saw the second plane crash. I don’t think I took a breath again for a minute. I sank.
Confused I was beside myself. Like an outer body experience. Just the February that passed… February I was in NYC for an photography show… I went to see a Warhol exhibit. NYC was my place. I made so many decisions to be there. I had almost taken a job out there wish I had to be honest with you. I loved NYC like it was my meant to be city. That February leaving the hotel with my dad near Pier 17 we decided to walk up to Wall St.
It was a cold morning that February… and we jumped into the World Trade Center buildings. It wasn’t on the schedule. Being a tourist in NYC was not on my schedule that day… but my father turns to me that morning and says want to go up to the Windows on the World.
This moment now a permanent never leaving moment because… as the buildings kept spewing smoke on 9/11, all I could think was imagine another father daughter in that building that morning who chose to go up to that 106th floor that day.
And then in the most devastating visual I ever saw the towers dropped. They came down, the crumbled with people inside. And I was gutted!
I could have been in that building minding my business. Coming in from maybe the early September heat. There could be another 20yo in the building like me and her life is over.
They started locking down the whole of NYC, planes were halted. Planes in the air were concerning. I needed to find my boyfriend. My father. International phone calls were difficult to get through. You couldn’t find them.
My poor cousin Maria trying so hard to console me while being confused by how traumatized by how I felt. My experience felt foreign to her and it was the first time Greece didn’t feel like home but that I was in a foreign place as well.
The trauma didn’t dissipate with getting people on the phone. The next day I went back to Sparta where my mother lived to be near my mommy. Here I am a 20yo woman needing her mommy. I needed something comforting. Mike my husband wanted his girlfriend to come home. My mother refusing to let me get on a plane. She refused. There was no way she was risking my life. I was safe in the village I would have to stay.
Sparta became an increasingly toxic place. My mother and I would speak English when together… people would curse at me. People would call me ‘dirty American’. People would say things like ‘you deserved it.’
I was now being attacked by fellow Greeks who were in the thrawls of entering the EU. And the campaigns to make it happen, to give up their money was that they would be sticking it to the Americans. They had turned a whole generation into anti-Americans and now they got to celebrate the twin towers collapse.
The trauma has never left. The whole experience tore my insides out. Not only did I have to deal with the devastation but I was dealing with it alone and I had to see others celebrate this thing that was so traumatic to me.
It took me over 10 years to go back to NYC. I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to go. It would never be the same again.
And by proxy I never stepped back onto Greek soil since.
2 of my favorite places in the world marred by this traumatic moment. Still devastated til this day. Still hurting.
On our first drive across the continent we stopped in NYC to see the World Trade center memorial. My husband had never been to NYC before 9/11. I couldn’t photograph the memorial properly not sure if it was my children who were unruly that afternoon or just the fact that I emotionally clocked out being there because it was still too hard to digest.
Mike was so happy to see it. He wanted to memorialize properly but I wasn’t any help at containing the children so we left. We ironically found a Greek diner around the corner… ironically there has always been a Greek presence around wall street… a Greek Orthodox church came down with the World Trade center so as a people we too felt the effects of this moment. But we sat down to eat and the walls were covered with photographs of the days following 9/11.
We honoured the closest firefighter station bought a tee from them that Mike lived in… his favorite tee for years.
9/11 while we didn’t lose any loved ones, it has affected us in many ways and we still cope with this day. I will never be the same… I am just different. I guess thats ok. But the world will never be the same and for that I am forever sad.
It took us over 4 hours to cross the border into the United States, not because the border was crazy busy but because Toronto shut down one its major arteries called the Gardiner Expressway.
The idea of crossing was crazy mostly for me who had been denied entry for unknown reasons previously. I had a lot of feelings about it. I was hurt and scarred by the whole thing, it has made me feel uncomfortable to cross back into the US, a place I love and feel like home.
We made it across with ease because we should easily cross. And with our 4 girls we didn’t even have a plan because we weren’t sure if we’d be able to cross. But here we went. So what was our trajectory? Well we couldn’t be in the US and not head to California. So LA was the goal.
We headed west towards the border and landed in Cleveland for the night.Part 1…
I had written a post about the world strong for today, … I did.
The Mom Oversharer 