Six months ago, at 9:46 am, I was standing at a co-worker's desk, catching up from being a bit late to work, going through my normal routine, when someone asked me if I had heard a plane hit the World Trade Centre. I thought she was talking about a small plane, maybe a four-seater--it's happened before, so I was like, "oh", curious, but not alarmed. Then someone came out of an office and said, "a plane just hit the Pentagon".

I replied, "that's embarrassing". I mean, we're supposed to be the most powerful nation on earth. The Pentagon's our military's brain centre. Like most people, I didn't understand what had really happened yet.

I went back to my office and decided to look up the news on the Internet. I couldn't get to Yahoo!, CNN, any of the news sites. That made me afraid. It meant something big was happening, due to all the traffic.

So I went into one of the rooms at work that has a TV, and found a bunch of people sitting around watching the twin towers. Then it began to dawn on me. I sat down, and spent the next couple of hours watching it unfold. At one point, about fifteen minutes later, a resident from New York and I were the only ones in the room. He'd just pointed out where his cousin lived and had told me his girlfriend went to the WTC every morning.

Then the tower collapsed.

We just looked. He kind of crumbled in on himself, and had to leave the room. I sat there staring--I didn't really understand. I'd never been to a city as large, as concentrated in population, as New York. I'd never been in a building higher than 26 stories. I didn't realise that standard procedures called for the fire department to set up on the first floor of a high rise. I thought they were in the street, and that they were in danger of the debris, but I didn't know it came down right on top of them. I hadn't realised that people had been jumping to their deaths. I didn't realise how long it took to evacuate those buildings. I didn't realise the full problem, in fact, until sometime in October when I watched an analysis of the attacks and the aftermath. I couldn't comprehend, because it was outside of my experience, and my mind refused to realise the full horror. I still thought most of the people were safe. And all, in all, I guess that was right--I mean so many did make it out. But I didn't understand that in that one moment, thousands died in front of me. My mind just froze. And I stayed, and then the second one came down, then they talked about other planes in the sky, someone said one had been spotted in our region; rumours ran rampant, fear was in the air. And for the first time, I got an inkling of what the end of the world could be like. I kind of wonder if it ever happens, will we realise what's going on before it's too late?

Six months have passed. Death tolls have been revised. Stories have been told. Memorials have been created. We look a little differently at our mail. A police car sits in front of our water supply. Our world has gone on, but it's been changed, at first blatantly, now more subtly. We were never really safe, but we had an illusion that has now been stripped away. In the long run, I think that may be good. We will change, adapt, evolve.

But at a price. Nearly 4,000 people died that day, in the space of about an hour. More have died since, in the war that has ensued. Death is a natural thing. Some would argue that death caused by hate was a natural part of our world, our species. Maybe so. But it can be so much more, and in the meantime--it is such a shame upon our species that hate and terror should be so devastating.

It is 10:05 by my computer. May those that died be remembered, those left be comforted, and may the Gods give us wisdom to overcome.