I was in London when the towers fell, only arrived a few hours before. We’d flown from Boston on a red-eye the previous night, stumbling our way through Heathrow airport at 5:00 in the morning, blurry-eyed and jet-lagged, our only thought being to pass through immigration as quickly as possible and find our way to the train and from there to our hotel where we could sink into oblivion for a few hours. I could already feel the tell-tale signs of a cold settling in, scratchy throat, runny nose, head pounding in rhythm to the pulsing of fluorescent lighting. I seemed to inevitably contract some dreadful virus every time we flew and all I wanted was to sleep it away.

I drifted in and out of delirious slumber on the Heathrow Express to Kings Cross station, settled into that strange limbo of not-quite-arrived-in-a-new-country-yet, fellow riders moving in and out of the frame, but never completing a picture. I barely remember hailing the taxi at Kings Cross or the forty-minute ride to our Bed and Breakfast in Muswell Hill, but I do recall with clarity, the relief of lifting our packs from the back of the cab and up the short flight of stairs, the welcomed feeling of letting them fall to the floor and crawling under the covers without even bothering to change.

We were instantly dead to the world, but only a few hours later I was awakened by my worsening sore throat and headache. I glanced at my sleeping husband and turned the TV on, volume low, and stared blankly at the news for a moment until the image on the screen snapped me out of my stupor. I increased the volume, the frantic voice of the news anchor filling the room and one of the towers smoking on the screen.

I shook Mateo awake. “That’s weird,” I pointed at the screen, “a plane just ran into one of the towers of the World Trade Center.” We watched in silence for a few minutes before he drifted off again. The next time I shook him awake, it was with more urgency. “Another plane just hit the other tower!” The reporters were still assuming the collisions were accidents.

“There’s no way that was an accident,” I glanced at him for confirmation, noted his jaw working the way it did when he was worried. “You can’t accidentally fly into two buildings right next to each other.”

Mateo agreed, although, like the rest of the world watching the tragedy unfold in real time, we had no explanation as to what could be happening. We stayed glued to the TV, feeling utterly helpless as the story only got worse. By the time we were forced to leave our room to go look at flats to rent (we couldn’t afford more than a couple of nights in a hotel), it was becoming clear that our homeland had been attacked, and not only that, two of the flights had left from Logan airport, one of them a United Airlines flight—we had flown on a United flight from Logan just hours before. Of course we had been in no danger, but in moments of intense fear and emotion, the mind draws connections any way it can, in an effort to empathize I think. There’s always that, it could have been us moment, a moment we experienced repeatedly as cab driver, after real estate agent, after barista, after random person on the street, expressed their condolences, shock, and solidarity. It was hard to accept condolences—as far as I knew, there was no one close to me who had been hurt or lost their life and it was a challenge to feel like I was a part of the national trauma when I was so far away. I worried that the distance would make it difficult for me to share the grief, fear, and later, communal rage.

I can’t say why I haven’t written about it until now, but I think that at the time, I knew that anything less than unbridled patriotism would have seen me thrown to the wolves. I assume the same to be true today, although we have twenty years of aftermath and prospective at our disposal. While there is no denying that my heart swelled with patriotism and my tears flowed freely for a long time after, and even now when I hear survivors’ voices on the radio, a degree of clarity that could only come from having traveled for three years before, a sort of juxtaposition I suppose, made the whole experience more complex. While I shared the horror and the condemnation of my fellow countrymen and women, I didn’t share the shock, the how could this have happened? I had spent too much time learning about the less savory aspects of US foreign policy and one of the first thoughts that crossed my mind, one that I swatted away, quashed, and buried was, I guess we finally pissed someone off just enough.

And that made me angry. Angry because I didn’t want to think that, angry because I didn’t want to wonder why—because when something so horrific happens there is no why, right? There’s no excuse, there’s no good reason, there’s no way to make sense of it. I was so young, so righteously appalled at both the terrorists, and the policies that, to my mind, invoked such blind hatred.

We all remember where we were, or weren’t, as the case may be. We all remember because everything changed, not just for us, in the United States, but for the whole world. War had come to us, on our own soil, but not war as we had seen in the past. It was a new kind of war, unpredictable, irreconcilable. It changed the way we lived, the way we traveled, the way we trusted or distrusted.

So, no, I can’t forget. I can’t forget how helpless I felt as my country came together, but I wasn’t there. I won’t forget how adrift I felt, how disconnected. We tried, in our small group at school, at local candlelight vigils and in sharing circles to feel like we too, were a part of the unity, even from so far away, but it just felt like we were alone, cut off from the massive waves of grief that our country was suffering from but also from the tides of togetherness. I guess I never wrote about it because I didn’t know what to say, almost, like I felt I didn’t have the right to write about it because I wasn’t home.