The day was just like any other. Except it happened to be September eleventh, and every adult in the school building seemed to be spouting anti terrorism propaganda at my peers and myself, as if we had any real concept of what terrorism is. I was still not fully comfortable in high school, but that was primarily due to a difficult freshman year. However, one class managed to become my safe space. Choir. 9/11 fell on a tuesday in 2018, so we only had 45 minutes in each class. However, Mr. Grotzky, the choir teacher, had plans for how we would spend class that day. Plans that didn’t involve music.

We came into the classroom, chattering with our friends and sitting down, and all the while he sat pensively at his station behind the piano that was the focus of the small semi-circle room. I remember feeling that his quietness was strange, but I was more focused on my book, or my friends, or my homework that I needed to finish before next period.

The bell rang and signaled the beginning of the period, and the class fell quiet out of habit, or confusion. Usually our teacher would be telling us to pipe down by now so we could begin our warm ups. But still he sat. He stayed put for another moment, and then he stood, picked up his chair, and moved it in front of the piano -so that we no longer had the instrument between us and him- and he set it down and sat again.

“When was the oldest of you born?” he asked. Instantly, we knew he was going to give us a talk about 9/11, which was something we had learned about our whole lives and were getting tired of hearing about. Usually, I would tune these sorts of talks out, but I truly respected Mr. Grotzky, so I looked toward the seniors in the room. The oldest of them had been born in 2000, and naturally had no memory of the afternoon the twin towers fell.

Grotzky seemed fascinated by this, and he shared with us where he had been when the towers fell. He told us how vividly he remembered it, and how he knew he could ask any adult in his life what they were doing, and that they would have a similarly lucid answer.

Then, he said something that truly stuck with me. He said, “When I was in highschool, enlisting in the army ment spending a few years partying in Germany before coming home and joining the workforce. But you guys are growing up during a war.”

My perception of the world changed, because I realized he was right. Our country was at war. Just days prior I had been pleading with my boyfriend to rethink his decision to join the marines, and I still somehow hadn’t fully realized the fact that we are at war because it isn’t on my doorstep. And I wasn’t even born yet to be a part of the day that started the war on terror.

Flash forward to 2020. Among other things, a pandemic sinks its claws into every corner of the planet. As the United States finally begins to take the threat seriously my school sends me off on spring break and never asks me to come back. Instead we adopt an online model that takes almost a month to implement. And even then, it is incredibly flawed, and I finish the year having learned nothing since the weeks before spring break, and receiving a 2 on two of my three AP exams. I had a clear idea of the pandemic early on thanks to my mother’s profession, and her work friend who works under Dr.Fauci. However, my understanding of a virus, and how this specific virus was different from all others, wouldn’t help me in the year long quarantine that followed.

I have learned a lot about myself and humanity in the last year. And after all of it, I keep looking back to that day in choir, and thinking, “This is my generation’s war.” It isn’t like 9/11. There isn’t one moment that defines this catastrophe. But it is an event that every single member of my generation will always remember.

First there was 9/11. An event the vast majority of my generation can’t remember. And now, this.