I remember where I was on September 11. I was asleep.

I decided I shouldn't take Jeanie Hey's world politics class, since it might be too much work for me. What a great excuse that was for me in that first year: "I'm too busy." I was never too busy! In any case, that meant that I slept in that morning. But I set my alarm for some amount of time, maybe nine o'clock.

My alarm clock was set to turn on the radio when it went off, and I set it to whatever station happened to come in. Apparently I hit on a talk radio station, because when the radio woke me, I heard something on the radio about the World Trade Center towers having collapsed. In my grogginess, I thought that this was either a dream or a bad joke. Radio stations put their jerkiest disc jockies on in the morning; these "shock jocks" are usually crude and tasteless, and so I figured this is what was going on. World Trade Center towers fallen down? Don't be ridiculous.

So I woke up. Then I went downstairs to visit either Ashli or Jessica Jewell. I can't remember which. But when I saw the TV, I knew that the radio wasn't joking. The World Trade Center towers were on fire, both of them, apparently hit by airplanes in what appeared to be a terrorist attack. I don't remember if the towers had fallen by that time, or if just one of them had fallen. All I know is that I was fixated on the TV, wondering how this had happened, trying to comprehend that it had happened at all.

I remember watching one of the towers fall and not quite believing that it had happened. Lots of people's reactions were that it was like watching a movie. That's because buildings falling down like that isn't something that happens in real life. It's something so unreal that it can only be imagined in a Michael Bay film. If airplanes hitting the World Trade Center was impossible, then the towers falling down was unimaginable.

My friends and I sat, fixed on the TV, learning all we could about what had happened. Again and again we watched video footage of the towers being hit, of the towers falling, of people screaming in the streets, and then running to escape the huge, billowing cloud of dust that completely enveloped lower Manhattan. Apparently a million tons of steel, glass, aluminum, and concrete generate a lot of dust. On CNBC, one of the financial news anchors visited the morning show, completely covered from head to toe with a layer of brown-gray dust. We spent the day watching television, and wondering if Peter Jennings would ever get to sleep.

Many professors canceled classes that day. Miami University declared Friday a holiday, allowing students to spend a three-day weekend at home with their families. Like most of my other friends, I stayed in Oxford.

To this day, whenever I see footage of the towers falling, I can't believe it's real. It's hard to separate that image from a thousand other images of destruction that all came from the movies. It was so sudden: the top of the building just started falling, and the rest of the building followed suit. Of course, whenver a plane hits a building, the first thing in everyone's mind must be, "Is it going to fall down?" Even though the thought occurred to us, we dismissed it as impossible.

Watching all of these September 11 retrospectives takes me back to four years ago. I was just a freshman in college then, and what a thing to be hit with in the first three weeks of class. For the most part, I think we overcame it, but it will always be part of our college experience.