On September 11, 2001, I was in history class at Tri-County when our teacher announced that the World Trade Center was gone. I had been online a few minutes earlier and noticed out of the corner of my eye something having to do with an attack on New York and Washington, but I was too busy checking emails and haunting message boards devoted to obscure Eighties British bands to notice.

The previous week, our teacher had asked us to consider writing about a historical event in the context of a contemporary news article, so for some reason when she told us about the attacks I thought she was trying to provide us with an example of what we needed to strive for. It only really registered when she called on a classmate who detailed how the towers, so sturdy and domineering when our Drama Club tour bus passed near them on a field trip less than six years before, were now merely piles of rubble. Some of my classmates, no doubt conditioned by the explosions they’d seen in action movies over the past decades, said something about how “cool” it must have looked. I can’t say I blamed them for not comprehending just what happened and how it wasn’t some part of an over-the-top action movie.

In the hours that followed, I drove from school and swung by work to get a sense of just what was going on. People I talked to told me how the high school had let out early so that kids could be with their parents, in case this was really the end of it all. I got online again at my mom’s house, trying to see what exactly was happening. As the information piled up, some of it legit but a lot of it speculation, I got angry about how we had been attacked, and I probably let vent my emotions on a few internet forums. Everyone was rushing to the gas stations, trying to stock up at the grocery store, or just sitting in front of their TVs trying to make sense of it.

When I got home, no one was home, and I started watching the NBC coverage of the attacks. I learned that the Pentagon had been hit, and a plane headed for the Capitol Building in Washington crashed in a field in Pennsylvania. As the reality of the towers coming down was played and replayed, I turned to music: the two songs I kept playing as the images flashed on the screen were “Dear God” by XTC and “God” by John Lennon. The former asked how a just and merciful Higher Power could exist in a world of such suffering; the latter rejected the belief in anything greater than the individual. Both seemed appropriate for the day’s events, and it was a long time before I could listen to either without seeing the towers crashing from the landscape.

Bomb threats weren’t slow in coming, of course; I think the first one was called in to Tech the Thursday after the attacks. Everyone was skeptical, but not taking any chances. We were evacuated, and as I stood in the parking lot waiting in vain for a chance to return to class I overheard two women talking about a mutual friend whose daughter happened to have a birthday on 9/11. The mom had called in spite of everything to wish her girl a happy birthday, but the daughter responded that she didn’t really feel like celebrating.

That Thursday, I went bar-crawling with my cousin Brandon, who was going to Clemson at the time. It seemed like the world was about to end anyway, so why not go out with a hangover? As we watched the ceremonies to honor those who died earlier in the week (every bar had their TVs turned to the coverage), we couldn’t help cracking darkly humorous jokes about how happy Gary Condit looked; he was the guy caught up in a political sex scandal all summer, while Al Qaeda was plotting to fly a bunch of planes into buildings. We drank, and drank, and tried to make sense of the new reality, one that stood definitively as a pre-/post- kind of divide.

Eight years later, the world is still going, and the pain of that day is fading. Maybe not for the families of those who died, but the rest of us are certainly aware that there isn’t that same sense of shared grief anymore. You can argue about how the Bush administration squandered the goodwill brought about by 9/11, but it’s hard to forget that day. The best revenge against those who tried to change our way of life is to not let them get away with, and live the best life that we can not in spite of 9/11 but because of it. But we should also remember what happened, and how we responded to it, because that’s the best memorial for those who didn’t get that chance.