Two Sundays ago marked the 10th anniversary of the attacks on Sept. 11. I don’t have anything to say that hasn’t already been said. All I can offer is my personal experience.

My fifth grade class was in the middle of story time when we heard the terrible bang that heralded the end of one world and birthed another, colder and more terrible. Later, in Spanish class, we ducked under our desks and hugged each other, certain that the fighter jets that flew overhead were on their way towards us. All logic suspended that day, it made indisputable sense that an elementary school on the Lower East Side would be next.

After school, I went to my neighbour’s apartment and watched as the towers collapsed again and again, as small black dots took their fatal leaps a fourth, fifth, and sixth time. I watched from my bedroom as awful black smoke marched up First Avenue and enveloped us in its terrible, terrible truth.

I don’t think I said anything that day. All I could do was absorb my surroundings, and even then my 10-year-old brain never processed the awful reality broadcasted in repetition on my neighbour’s television. The pretty buildings were falling. The view from my window had been altered. We couldn’t reach my father, who had an office on Maiden Lane, and for the first time in my life, my mother was not in control.

I knew the world was different because it hurt to inhale the black air that filled my apartment and left a sharp, mean taste in my mouth. We were literally breathing in death, the charred remains of our neighbours. My father was the only one to cough it back up; that same day, we escaped to New Jersey.

In the weeks and months following the attack, my mother and I read the victim profiles in the New York Times, crying at the kitchen table but forcing ourselves to finish each one. It was our duty to commemorate each life as it, and our understanding of what had happened, slipped like sand through our fingers.

I was in shock at first; then I was sad. Now, I am angry.

When Osama bin Laden died I, not typically bloodthirsty or religious, breathed a sigh of relief and thanked God.

I really don’t want to see another picture of the burning towers. I don’t want to think about it anymore. Over the past few days I’ve felt like a train was rushing me towards the anniversary and I panicked, not yet ready to face that day. This 10 year anniversary has forced me to process what I never could when I was ten. The fist in my gut tightened, then slightly unclenched. Ten years is still too soon, but it is enough time to begin to reflect.

Last week, Yale Professor Jay Winter wrote that we have no choice but to remember; that it is a moral act to mark each death.

“They did not have the good fortune to die one at a time. That is why we must remember them one at a time.”

That day, in my city, the world and my place in it were irrevocably altered. My neighbours died, fighting to save themselves and each other and, when the time came, launched themselves out into the blue sky or crumbled beneath the avalanche of steel and concrete and souls. I am so lucky that I was in no real way affected by the events of that day. The best I can offer to those who were is to remember them, and, even all the way from Canada, offer my memory of that day to the mosaic of collective memory in an effort to preserve and honour them all.