Thinking back on it, Tuesday, Sept. 11, 2001 dawned a good day. The weather in Massachusetts was beautiful. It dawned with the promise that the fruit of the tree of life was ours for the plucking, a message reinforced by all the traditional "first day" speeches. And then, without notice, the world changed, and it was 9/11.
I remember thinking of all the times that I had been to the Twin Towers, and thinking that my brother might be there. My closest friends were at Stuyvesant High School, a few blocks away from Ground Zero, and as I tried desperately to get news of them through the jammed phone lines, I couldn't help but think that if I hadn't been at Andover, I would have been there with them.
It was 9/11, but even after the towers fell, it was still the first day of classes, my first day of high school. Classes proceeded as normal, and after class we all gathered in the green under an immaculate sky and mourned with the rest of the nation. In the absence of my mother, I cried into the shoulder of my house counselor, a woman I hardly knew, but whom I would come to love in those moments. For me, the collapse of the towers is inextricable from the beginning of my high school career.
And now that it is again the first day of classes and 9/11, I can't shake off the unease of the eerie coincidence. Something within me says that it should be a bad beginning. But it has been a great day. I'm finally a senior at Princeton; by now I know what I'm doing, and I know my place here. I've spent the last month and a half in Spain doing thesis work; I love my topic, and I'm ready and thrilled to tackle it. My first class of the day was riveting and electrifying. Labyrinth has placed the HIS and REL books on the open stacks, which largely solves my personal problems with the bookstore and has returned to me the pleasure of buying textbooks.
As terrible as 9/11/01 was, it was, in a way, a good beginning too. Those four years at Andover were wonderful, and in my heart, Andover is second only to New York. I love Princeton, but not the way I love Andover. So in my life, even amid the fire of destruction, something good was born.
Of course, many good dreams and many good people died that day. The world of the 1990s, where anything was possible and everything was ours for the taking, vanished into a world where we could have anything except the certainty of safety: a world where even a great day can be eerie and unsettling.
Now, as you read this, it is Sept. 12. In some ways, it has been Sept. 12 for seven years now. Eerie, strange, and always after Sept. 11. But yesterday, for a while, it was Sept. 11 again. It was a beginning, and it was an end, and it was the beginning of an end, and at long last, it was a good day again.
Martha Vega-Gonzalez is a senior in the history department from New York, N.Y. She can be reached at mvega@princeton.edu.
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