"After the covid quarantine lifted, I asked my dad what he would rather live through again - covid or 9/11, and he said 9/11. He said that after 9/11, there was a coming together to grieve, and we never got that with covid. He is a union representative for morgue workers. In the early days of the pandemic, they were under-reporting covid deaths. They had temporary morgues set up around the city because the city morgues couldn't fit everyone. They would go to people's houses daily, risk covid, and take the bodies and bring them to refrigerator trucks…" - Fiona (born in 1999)

"In my lifetime, throughout all of my schooling, we had lockdowns every time there was an active shooter nearby, so at least a handful of times a year. I was fortunate enough never to have been through that myself, but on the news, I’ve seen plenty of kids get murdered. We have issues of domestic terrorism people don’t even want to acknowledge in this country. 9/11 feels like another tragedy that happened in history, not that history doesn’t matter, but… so many tragedies are piling up daily; 9/11 is just another one.” - Kristen (born in 1998)

"I know many people who know somebody who died on 9/11 and others who have gotten cancer from 9/11. My dad swears he didn't get sick after 9/11 because of this woman, a stranger, who had to be carried out of the towers by medics. She stopped to give him a rag to put over his face while they ran away from the buildings. I guess it shows that masks work, right?" - Fiona (born in 1999)

"I remember the iPhone came out when I was in 4th grade. But I remember having a flip phone until then. What if we had iPhones and social media when this happened? The world in 2001 was so different." - Kristen (born in 1998)

“I was born in December of 2000 and was nine months old when it happened. My mom told me she was holding me while she was watching the planes hit the towers on television, and the first thing she thought was, 'What the fuck did I do bringing a child into this kind of world?'" -Layla (born in 2000)

"I was 10 going on 11 when 9/11 happened. My school, PS234, is the closest to the World Trade Center site. My family lives in the neighborhood, my parents work in the neighborhood, and sister is at Stuy. Everyone who went to school lived in the neighborhood, or varying degrees of it. We all had to literally walk away from our neighborhood. We returned home within 2 weeks of 9/11… needed to wait until the electricity was back. February 4th, 2002, was the date we were allowed to return to school. This girl Lila in my class was away from her home for 3 years. I went to school with all those kids you see in newspapers; that was my elementary school. People wore facemasks for months, and then you got above 14th street, and it was like nothing happened. You weren’t fucking there, don’t be pilgrims at this site. This is OUR neighborhood. These are OUR long-term side effects. My level of grief is ... THIS is my neighborhood, this is my memory of having to leave and not knowing when I would go home." - Anonymous

"I was never taught about 9/11 in school, but I grew up in a community where every year on 9/11, the principal would come over the intercom, and we would have a moment of silence. I was part of a generation of kids who didn't even know why we were having a moment of silence. I have a younger sister who was born in 2005. She was taught about 9/11 in school. It's a chapter in her history book. She has been taught more about it." -Max (born in 1997)

"I remember the first time I found out about it, we were driving into the city and there was this block of space, and my mom said, 'there were once towers there.' We don’t talk about 9/11 much. We used to talk a lot about it in middle school. There would be firefighters who would come in and talk about taking bodies out of the building, and it was traumatic. I was 12 when they started doing this. We knew how bad it was, but we were shocked hearing how many people lost their lives and how affected people were." - Emma (born in 2003)

"My uncle died in the World Trade Center. He was in the 2nd tower on the 84th floor. Mayor Guiliani had a fund. When I was little, we would get free things. One time I got a free trip to Disney World. I was poor and grew up in a poor family. We would have never gotten to go to Disney. It was enough to redo our house and go on an island vacation. They bought us cars. My mom had never seen any of that money in her life. And because of the 9/11 lawsuit, I could get things I don’t think I would have had access to otherwise. It didn’t make the pain go away, but it numbed it for a couple of years. And as easy as the money came in – it went. We burned through it. 9/11 was the day my childhood ended, and I lost my innocence. I started hearing adult conversations. After 9/11, I had an intense fear of fire. To this day, I flip out over flames in the kitchen. I’ve never smoked a cigarette because I’m afraid of the … this sounds silly… the lighter." - Anonymous

“I was 6 when I became a Cub Scout at Pack 142. At all the meetings, we’d often see this poster, this flag with a silhouette of New York City during sunset and words over them, Never forget, 9/11/2001. I didn’t know what that meant at the time. I kept seeing it over and over again throughout my cub scout years…Never forget? Never forget what? It wasn’t until I left Pack 142 that I realized what we were never supposed to forget.” - Jason (born in 2000)

"On October 31, 2017, I was sitting in my classroom at Stuyvesant High School, wondering why I couldn’t go home. We were locked down. They wouldn’t tell us any information - it was up to us to find out. I was in school, dressed as a cat, and we had to stay an extra 3 hours. It was already dark when we left, and nobody wanted to go trick or treating. Several hundred feet away, a guy ran down Hudson River Park’s bike path with a rental truck and killed eight people because he heard from ISIS it’s better to strike terror on holiday. Politicians scrambled to take advantage of the moment: 'the deadliest terror attack in NY since 9/11.' Humanity is lost, nothing is found, and I don’t know what to think anymore." - Jason (born in 2000)

"I first learned about 9/11 through coloring pages. They were coloring pages of the World Trade Center (before it was hit) and fire trucks. There were also pictures of American flags and people standing in front of the American Flag, firefighters, nurses, the heroes, pledging allegiance. Symbols of how great we are as a country. There was never much discussion other than, 'This thing happened - we're not going to explain, just color.' Each year, our teachers gave us a booklet on 9/11, and the whole morning we would color. The focus was always on how we were supposed to feel - sad, mad, and angry." - Toni (born in 2002)

"I saw the towers as a kid... actually, I can't remember if I saw them or if I've seen so many photos of them that I think it's my own memory. It's one of those things, like Princess Diana... you remember her, but you don't know how or why. The first time I actively remember seeing photos of the World Trade Center was in 3rd grade, in textbooks... in the pictures of history books." - Melissa (born in 1998)

"I grew up on Long Island. Everyone on Long Island has a relative, uncle, or someone they knew in the towers that day. The stories are like a mythology that gets passed down and is different in every family. My dad was working in the city on September 11th, 2001. The story from my family that day was that we couldn't contact him because the cell towers were down, so they just had to wait for him to come home. 9/11 always had an 'Americana' feeling associated with it... like, flags in your face. Now, we are so numb to many things, so it doesn't provoke much, but thinking about it brings you back to the early 2000s when you would think in that color scheme... red, white, blue." - Melissa (born in 1998)

"It happened long ago but not long enough to completely detach ourselves from it. It's not just a tragedy in a book. The wound can't heal when there are witnesses, fresh eyes that relive that moment in their heads, witnesses who speak and pass the moment along with their words. There are people today who are still mourning over their loss, I don't think one can get truly over something like that. Its grief at a massive scale. It's fear in each other, between communities and nations. There is worry and uncertainty floating around. A terrible loss. A traumatic disaster. That day marked the loss of hope and innate good in humankind. I mean, we are literally still talking about it right now." - Marielle (born in 2001)