I recently turned 28, and as it happens for many people on a birthday one can’t help but reflect. College graduation is one of life’s watershed moments, and I’ve always found it strange, or depressing, or ironic that mine occurred just a few months before the 9/11 attacks—for some reason this is what I’ve thought about during the past week.

After graduating from college in 2001 it was a lazy happy time for me. My friends and I waited out the summer months for fall to arrive, and with it the pressing reality that it was time to grow up and begin real careers for ourselves.  

When fall did come, it was not new jobs or new apartments ushering in our adulthood—it was a sunny September morning when the entire world changed.

The day after the World Trade Center was attacked, I sent an email to Renay, a college friend who’d just recently begun working in downtown Manhattan. I needed to make sure she was alright. She replied days after that she was indeed safe, but said little more.  

Eighteenth months later my Marine reserve unit deployed to Iraq for the initial invasion. Renay sent me a short email of thoughts and prayers. In the rush of activity before deployment, I don’t even remember if I had time to respond.

It was shortly after I returned from Iraq when I finally sat down with Renay, in a quiet Manhattan lounge, for the first time since those final nostalgic moments of our college years.

That cute blonde girl sitting in my freshman English class, with springy curls and a bubbly laugh, now sat before me as a witness to one of the most tragic moments in our nation’s history. And I in turn sat before her as a newly minted veteran from a war that still raged.

At one point she leaned forward, putting her elbows on her knees, running her fingertips along her shoulders and pointing out each place where she had been cut by falling debris from the second tower.  

I told her about the war, and regarded her as having a sympathetic and knowledgeable ear.  She was a good friend from the days of professors, exams, and crowded dorm room parties; but she also, like me, had found herself inexplicably caught up in a defining moment of our generation.

Though our experiences were nothing alike, the once intangible headlines had suddenly found us. Sitting together, in the same city whose tragedy had drastically altered the course of our own lives, it simply didn’t seem right.

Was this world we were now living in truly unique unto itself? Or were we experiencing the same world for the first time?

Now, at the age of 28, many of my friends are getting married. The chaotic rush of tragedies, which greeted our graduating class, has now ushered in a protracted lull of uneasy waiting.  

When a bomb explodes in London, we watch the news for American casualties, and telephone all of our friends living abroad.  When a terrorist call is intercepted by the government, we watch barriers erected in front of our office buildings; we watch the national news to see how security measures will affect our own morning commutes.  If a friend in the military is serving overseas, we watch each day if theirs will be the next face to accompany the casualty numbers.

This is what we live with. This is how we may someday tell our children it used to be during the first decade of the twenty-first century. But there is still no way for us to know whether these circumstances were born of our own time—or whether each successive generation finds itself at the cusp of adulthood wondering the very same thing.