How could this have happened? Things like this didn't happen, not in real life. The images playing out on the screen were horrific – apocalyptic; a bird's eye view of humanity's destruction. I longed to turn away, to stop viewing the unfolding calamity, but my body was frozen. A din of voices coalesced around me, each one blurring into the next. Each one as stunned as the next. The open textbook in front me seemed a mundane reminder of a world that many would never again see – a world that for them had ceased to exist.
So many people, trapped in two monoliths that reached the sky – a sky that reflected none of the carnage that rested beneath it. Smoke billowed out of the gaping wounds, a grey ink that was slowly consuming the skyline. I wondered what the people inside thought. Did they see the faces of their family or could they even think at all, too consumed with the need to survive. They had warranted nothing like this to happen, they were just ordinary citizens who had been thrust into the race for their lives. Some of the people had found a way to escape. Figure after figure plummeted through the air – a ten second journey that offered nothing but the unknown, releasing them from a fate worse than death - falling from the tombs that reached the heavens. The news cameras captured the harsh reality of obliteration. Emergency personnel were flooding into the buildings; selflessly running into a situation that so many were trying to flee from. Every single one of those men and women had lives, had homes – had futures that promised happiness. For them the future was now a foreign concept.
We had all been living in ignorance, paying no attention to the increasing danger that was approaching. The bubble had been burst and the utopian society that the country seemed was shown to be just a carefully constructed facade – a facade that had been shattered in mere minutes. How many had paid the cost of our complacency? A place that was once so filled with life had become a wasteland, countless lives had been raked. The two towering monuments to man's achievement had been purged from existence. All that remained was a mountain of smouldering debris and an army of souls searching for the loved ones they would never find. Everything that was had imploded.
This was just the beginning. Pandora's Box had been opened and America was left with a scar that would never fade - a scar that would forever be a reminder. Our futures were irreparably changed. My generation would have to fight the battle all alone – armed with nothing more than the grief of a nation. There would be no absolution, no ending to a war that was started in the most unforgivable of ways. I was sat in an unimportant classroom in Minnesota, surrounded by my classmates, yet the date that was etched onto the board was the day The World changed. The day The World was kicked awake and forced to face the knowledge that nothing would ever again be normal.