How I remember the day that changed us all...

Everything went great that year after dealing with January. Chet and I grew closer and closer and by August he had proposed. For the most part the first half of that year was great.

Then came September. I had just moved in with Chet and his roommates and all was good. Chet was set to go on another underway and I had a new job lined up. That Tuesday morning started off as any other morning that Chet had left on an underway...

We got up early that morning and said our good byes, we had spent enough time apart to know that everything would be fine for the next month and a half. He said good bye and I started to get up and get ready for my first day as the Sales Manager at a local hotel. Little did any of us know what the day had in store for us. It was just another September 11th to most of us.

I can remember being in the lobby of the hotel as the maintenance manager came running in pushing a television on a cart and then jumped up on a chair to pull a cable drop out of the ceiling "You have to see this!" he yelled as he connected the television to the cable and turned it on. There in front of us was this terrible image of one of the Twin Towers with smoke pouring out of it. We all know how the next few hours went.

I left for lunch that day and found two messages on my phone from my friend Leigh, she had just moved to Groton, CT with her new husband (Chet's old roommate) and had also seen the images that plastered every television station that morning. She was scared, I was too...her husband was out to sea with Chet on a fast attack submarine that was only supposed to be gone for 4-6 weeks and now this happened, we didn't know what this would mean for them. I called her back and we met at the apartment that Chet and I shared with his friends Dave and Eric. Dave too was on the USS Toledo with Chet and Tim and Eric had reported for work that morning as usual. I got to the answering machine to find no messages from anybody. Leigh and I sat and watched the images over and over on television.

The weeks that followed the episodes of 9/11 are mainly a blur. Leigh and I bonded over lots of alchohol and thanks to our friend Holly, we made it through a bad time, created our own candle light vigil with white candles stuck into Budweiser bottles. The boat came home just a few days later than planned and for the most part, everything went back to normal. Holly and Shawn had their wedding as planned, without the delay that those terrible people tried to put on it.

It was in the face of this tragedy that we all found our own outlets for pain. Each and every person dealt with all that the events brought and how it changed our own individual worlds. No two people had the same story, and no two people had the same feelings. We have all moved on and taken from that day different lessons.