On September 10, 2001, I spent my last day living with my parents.

I don’t remember it.

That’s the strange part. I know it happened because twenty-year-old me wrote about it a few days earlier. I was quitting my job, going to a Modest Mouse show, and then leaving on a couple-week road trip before moving to Seattle. In the middle of that little countdown I wrote, almost casually, “my last day home is monday then driving.”

Monday was September 10.

The next morning my friend Melody called and woke me up. She had recently moved to New York and told me to turn on the news. For some reason my dad was still home, so I walked downstairs and told him to change the channel because something was happening. We had missed the first plane hitting the World Trade Center. We watched the second one.

I remember sitting there with him, stunned, as everything unfolded.

And then eventually my dad reminded me that I was supposed to leave.

He told me I should get in the car and go before they closed the Canadian border.

So I did.

I met my friend Erin in Seattle. We had trouble finding anywhere open because everything was shutting down. Driving north, I remember noticing how strange the sky was. There were no airplanes. You don’t normally notice airplanes until every single one of them is suddenly gone.

Then I crossed into Canada and there they were again.

It was like airplanes had been reinvented.

I was headed to Trinity Western in Langley to spend a week with my best friend Josh. Guys were walking around campus wearing American flags as capes. Josh and I were both deeply uninterested in patriotism, so we spent a lot of the week talking about that and making fun of what felt to us like a lot of performative American craziness. Mostly, though, we just kicked around Langley together. It was a really nice week with my best friend.

After that I stopped with Aunt Donna in Eastern Washington for a day or two, then drove to Nampa, Idaho, to see Elton. I slept on his floor, hung out with his friends, and remember watching Bottle Rocket. Then I kept going toward Seattle.

I’ve always told people I moved to Seattle on 9/11. Technically, I didn’t arrive in Seattle for good that day. September 11 was simply the first leg of the journey. But it was the day I left my parents’ house behind and started moving toward the life I was going to build.

The whole world was changing at exactly the same time my whole world was changing.

And somehow the day immediately before all of it—the last day of my old life—is the day I can’t remember at all.