The tragedy one week ago today touched everyone’s lives, no matter if you knew a person involved or not. Luckily, I don’t have any family members in the New York or Washington, D.C. area, and I don’t have any living relatives in the military. But I was affected heavily as a student journalist and as a human being.

Tuesday afternoon, university classes were canceled and the entire campus was completely empty.

Downtown though, things were crazy because of a suspicious looking van with stolen license plates parked in front of the courthouse. Athens-Clarke County police had sectioned off the area, including the Red and Black’s office, the student newspaper I work for. For me to gain access to the building I had to fish out my press pass to verify I was a reporter.

Once I gained access, I was on my way to a long, emotion-suppressing day. Outside the Red and Black, students had already began an impromptu shrine to the victims at the Arches. The Arches are the trademark of the university, which serves as a gate between the downtown area and North Campus. Candles, flowers, American flags and notes were placed on the steps while students kept vigil.

There were cars parked downtown with messages of “America will survive,” and “God bless America,” scribbled in washable marker on its windows. Seeing signs of patriotism moved me to tears, but I had to push those back and go back to work.

The bomb threat was proven false, and I was on my way around campus with a photographer. I stopped at an apartment complex and talked to a girl who was sitting vigilantly by her phone, awaiting word of her best friend of five years.

Apparently he had a class inside one of the towers and she didn’t know if he had class that day. Visibly shaken, she described how her day had been, why she had a homemade flag posted on her window and how her friends were dealing with the situation. I could tell, even though she was desperately fighting back the tears, she needed to get feelings off her chest.

When the interview was over, all I could do is shake her hand, give her a warm smile and tell her I’d be thinking about her friend.

Stories such as that girl’s and others I heard that day didn’t affect me until later.

For example, while the destruction was unfolding Tuesday morning, I interviewed Archana, a girl from India who lives next door. She described how beautiful the view of Manhattan was when she had visited the top of the Trade Center during Labor Day weekend on a family trip.

I happened to be talking to her while we watched them fall live on CNN. Then there were the girls that I talked to at the Baptist Student Union who were watching the coverage vigilantly with their hands clasped together in silent prayer.

Meanwhile at the Red and Black, my co-workers and I were taking turns using the phone, while some of us juggled one to three stories. Since we are independent from the university, we’re lacking in funds so we didn’t have the luxury of television to keep up to date. We relied on a radio.

As the day went on, we scrambled to the newspaper stands downtown to grab the extra editions of the Atlanta Journal and the Athens Banner-Herald. Looking at the images of the people in suits running from the growing cloud of smoke or the two women clutching each other in terror, watching was almost too much to bear.

When I finally was done at 8:30 p.m., the entire staff booked it to the Taco Stand, a bar/Mexican restaurant that had big-screen televisions so we could watch President Bush’s address to the nation.

We all stood in the bar, hushing everyone to be quiet, when Dubya came on the screen. For the entire speech, no one spoke. Sandy put her head on my shoulder. For the first time in my life, I actually was attentive during a Dubya speech.

Right then and there I was finally allowed to act like a human being and actually feel affected by the day’s events. I was able to go home and watch the footage of the plane crashing, over and over, into the second tower. I saw people flinging themselves to their deaths, running from the towers and all of the other carnage.

These were all things that had been described to me, only through radio. I took all of those haunting images and condensed them in my mind, fully realizing what had happened that day.

And as I laid in bed, I realized that my life, and everyone else’s life, is never going to be the same – and I wish it didn’t have to be that way.

Amber Billings is a junior in journalism from Sioux City.