I had set my alarm for 9:30 a.m.; my flight was at 12:50 p.m. So I didn't understand when I awoke to a clock that said 7:25 and feeble morning fight that barely filtered through the small, shaded window.

"What is it mom?"
            "Jake, I don't think your flight is leaving today."
            "Why, what's going on?
            "A plane crashed into the World Trade Center. You better come downstairs."
With blurred vision I saw her walk out the door on her way back to the television. I wasn't far behind. So there it is. Just like everyone said it would be, like all the old folks remember just
where they were when the heard about poor JFK. Crystalline. Suspended in time. I won't forget the moment of knowing.

If that moment is precise, then the following two days were a numbed blur, which I must have shared with much of America. My jaunt through the Mediterranean had been almost a year in planning, born out of aborted plans to study abroad and an uneasy truce with my parents (I wanted go to India, they wanted Oxford.) The trip was planned for so long that I had ceased to be excited about it, my imagination already bored with its many pre‑departure sojourns. But I was ready. I was packed.

September 11th wiped the slate clean, and I was stuck at home, the last place I wanted to be. I went from never watching TV to sitting in front of the set, like a statue, for hours at a stretch.
            Plane crashes into Tower A, view from the East.
            Plane crashes into Tower B, view from the East.
           

occultism, Tool is as interesting thematically as they are musically. Tool's tour happened to stop in Chicago while I was there, so I paid $50 for a ticket to go to their concert by myself, and another $75 to switch my flight from the day before the concert to the day after. From September 9, to September 11, 2001.

Don't get excited, it's not like I was flying to New York, or back to college in DC. It was Chicago to Milan. If I'm going to talk about September 11th, then I should tell you that I was nowhere close to the Towers, the Pentagon, or the flights. I knew no one who was crushed or burned. I knew no one who decided they had to drop their kid off at school and missed being on the 88th floor, or whose kid was sick, and consequently, was on the 88th floor. I should also add that I didn't cry. And it wasn't a time for me to ask "Why?" like Aaron Brown, his question echoing out from command central in New York and across the plains of nodding America. I was among the untelevised and unheard many who knew "why", and it wasn't because "they" resented our freedom, thanks anyway, George. No, my September 11th was less an epiphany of the state of affairs in the world, and more a vivid and direct signal sent from the void. It said You were going here, now you are going there in a geographic and timely manner.

I fell asleep on top of the sheets at about six in the morning. My backpack leaned against the bed, bursting full with backpacking gear ‑ three pairs of REI polyester underwear, black Bollé sunglasses, 2 journals, a forest green parka, Let's Go guidebooks for Italy, Greece, and Turkey with the unwanted pages torn out ‑ my ticket was lying on the desk.