I was a Senior in high school when 9/11 happened. I saw the second plane hit on live tv as I sat in my classroom. I saw the towers fall in real time as reporters freaked out on screen. The entire school was eerily silent, yet buzzed with excited whispers. Being near a big military base, lots of my classmates were realizing that one or both of their parents were about to be deployed. We were at war.

This was my generation's Pearl Harbor.

I doodled this image in the days immediately after 9/11 as I processed what'd happened. It's based on the news coverage I saw. The idea was "The Dead Helped The Living." People on that one plane calling their loved ones before re-taking the plane and crashing into the field. People helping folks escape the towers, then going back in before they fell. Those news stories were on my mind as I doodled.

This drawing sucks, artistically speaking, and I never finished it. But the Feeling behind it, the History, the fact I drew it as an 17-year-old high school student trying to process seeing the worst terrorist attack on US soil in real-time on tv...that's what makes it important. That's what makes it worth keeping all these years, and sharing now.