Twenty-five years.

It’s strange how a date can become more than a date.

September 11 comes around every year, and for a moment, I remember where I was. I remember the confusion. The images on television. The feeling that something had changed, even though none of us knew yet just how much.

A whole generation has grown up knowing 9/11 only as history.

For some of us, it isn’t history.

We remember an ordinary morning becoming something else.

We remember watching strangers run toward people they had never met.

We remember names and photographs replacing numbers.

And maybe that’s what I want to hold onto tonight.

Not the hatred that caused that day.

The humanity that answered it.

Twenty-five years later, the world is still complicated. We still disagree. We still divide ourselves into sides far too easily.

But I’d like to believe that somewhere beneath all of that, we still have the capacity to run toward one another when it matters.

Tonight, I remember those who never made it home.

And I’m grateful that I did.

— Rowan Vale