09/11/2026
Twenty-five years.
And somehow, it still feels like yesterday.
I was sitting in math class my sophomore year of high school when the announcement came over the speaker. None of us really understood what we were hearing. We were teenagers trying to process something that felt impossible.
The rest of the school day was spent in the auditorium, mostly in silence. There was no normal school day anymore. No one knew what to say.
I walked home afterward and found my mom sitting in front of the television, watching the news as the same images played over and over again.
I remember the feeling more than anything. The confusion. The fear. The heaviness.
Twenty-five years later, those of us who lived through that day carry memories that never really left us. And for an entire generation born afterward, September 11 is history, but it is history that shaped the world they inherited.
Today, I think about the nearly 3,000 people whose lives were taken that day. The firefighters, police officers, EMTs, military personnel, passengers, workers, parents, children, friends, brothers, sisters, husbands and wives who never made it home.
And I think about the countless lives that changed forever afterward, the families who had an empty chair at the table, the first responders who carried what they witnessed for the rest of their lives, the children who grew up without a parent, and the communities who had to learn how to keep going.
Twenty-five years is a long time. But some moments don’t belong to the past. They become part of who we are.
So today, we remember.
Not just the tragedy, but the people.
The lives they lived.
The people who loved them.
The futures they should have had.
And perhaps the most meaningful thing we can do with a day like today is to remember how fragile life is, and choose, in the lives we are living now, to be a little kinder, a little more present, a little more connected, and a little less afraid to tell the people we love what they mean to us.
We remember them.
We carry them with us.
And we will never forget.
September 11, 2001 🕊️
25 years later.
