I was 16 at the time. I’m Canadian, but my high school wasn’t far from the border. New York City was less than a day’s trip away. A lot of high school is a blur by now, but I remember a few moments from that day pretty vividly.

I remember classes hadn’t even started yet, and I was in the cafeteria buying a quick breakfast. I think I was the only student in there at the time because class was going to start in like 5 minutes, but my best friend came in looking stunned.

She walked up to me and told me something, but she was speaking fast and I was still kind of groggy and only caught a little bit of it. At the time, I thought she’d said, “A train hit the world trade convention!!” And I blinked and said something like “Oh, that’s unfortunate . . . “

She wandered back out the doors, still looking dazed. I finished up my breakfast and ran to class, and then the teacher pretty much filed us all right back out the classroom door and into another class down the hall, because they had a TV. We were all watching the news and saw the second tower get hit in real time.

The teachers were all as stunned as the students, and first period was just spent watching the TV in grim silence. They tried to pull together some sense of normalcy from second period onward, but you could tell nobody’s heart was in anything. Some people tried to cope with humour. I very vividly remember standing in line for my second period class listening to other students talking about how the world felt different now, and one of my clownier classmates saying to his buddies, “The Pentagon’s a square now!”

I was actually saying to my friends a couple of days ago (one of them being the same friend who told me about the first plane in the cafeteria that day) that I feel like there’s a similar “change of eras” happening now. There was the pre-9/11 and the post-9/11 world, and I’m old enough to remember what it was like to live in both. Now there’s the pre-COVID and post-COVID world.

In a strange way I’m sort of cautiously optimistic about the post-COVID world in a way that I wasn’t about post-9/11. 9/11 was a sudden and devastating trauma to a nation that thought itself invincible, and its grief resulted in the spread of a lot of toxicity across the planet. COVID is a slower, global trauma, and one where people at all levels have had a lot more time for quiet reflection. More people are considering what they want their own futures, and their communities’ futures, to look like. Toxicity will still happen as people’s visions conflict and as old systems that are no longer fit for the new reality go through their death throes, but it almost feels more like the pain from cleaning a wound rather than the obsessive, feverish sting and burn of picking at it that came out of 9/11.

I hope we’re on our way to something better. Something kinder. If nothing else, I hope we’re on our way to treating the planet better. It may be slow, but I think we’ll turn things around. I’m seeing hints of it, here and there. I think enough of us want a kinder world to make it so.