Growing up overseas, I always felt safe in the knowledge that eventually I would move back to the US, most likely to NYC. My entire family was settled either in the boroughs of NY or in Washington DC, and my parents eventually came to maintain an apartment in Manhattan and I eventually attended NYU, receiving my B.A…

On the morning of 9-11 I was living in Provo, Utah attending graduate school. I left my house at 6:00 in the morning, 8:00 EST and hit the BYU bookstore to pick up some breakfast. I looked up at television screens positioned by the doors, normally reserved for school advertisements and BYU football propaganda and saw the plane hit the first tower. I couldn’t move. Suddenly, even at 6:40 in the morning, there were throngs of students around me, staring at the television screens in shock. I ran to the lab to get to a phone and tried to call my parents in NYC, my father was working at Citicorp Center. I tried to call my sister, who works for the US Dept of Foreign Aid and was on a trip to Burundi. I couldn’t get through. It suddenly occurred to me that there were people I knew and cared about that were in the towers, that my graduation ceremony from college was in the towers, that many people would be affected by this. Until then, it hadn’t seemed real. I realized my (deceased) uncle’s precinct (NYPD) was the 1st and that his partner and his co-workers were likely on the scene risking their lives.

I sat in my little office, on the top floor of probably the tallest building in a small town and recognized that my life, and most likely, all americans’ lives would change.