The  morning of September 11, 2001, I was at a friend’s house in Las Vegas.  Around 8 am, I stumbled out of bed, expecting to find my friends huddled over coffee mugs at the kitchen table. Instead I found them gathered in silence around the television.

Through blinking, bleary eyes, we watched the Twin Towers come down, over and over and over.

“Nothing will ever be the same again,” someone said.

In the aftermath, I read very few of the many articles about the attacks because I just didn’t have it in me. But I could not avoid seeing images, and two of them were so moving they’ve stuck with me for eight years.

One of them was a snapshot someone took of an offering left in front of the American Embassy in Denmark. It was a candle surrounded by flowers and a hand-lettered sign that read in English: “All of us today are USA.”

The other image was the one below.

I don’t think I’ll ever forget how these pictures made me feel, just as I will never forget that day.

Guardian Angel Ice Sculpture by artist Darlene Racicote of Ontario, Canada, originally uploaded to Flickr by jvc_scout_mom.