I was a junior in college on September 11. Coming back to work at the university where I completed my undergraduate degree has brought plenty of déjà vu moments—not to mention the surreal feeling of seeing my children walk the sidewalks I once walked as a student—but today, twenty-five years after the attacks, I became aware that there was a lot of time and space between then and now.

All of it can be classified as after.

Just as there were on the fifth and tenth and twentieth anniversaries of that clear-blue Tuesday, today’s news has featured a parade of recollections, photos and videos just as fresh in my mind as they were a quarter century ago. There have been a few stories I hadn’t heard, new chapters to consider.

For the first time, there is a focus on the generation that was born and has come of age in the span of days since our national frame was shattered.

In the New York Times, stories from a young man who grew up without his mother, who left him, then ten months old, in the care of her parents before dashing off to work in the south tower. Another who discovered a video of her as a child at a family Christmas party on the 99th floor, taken by her father, who would later die on 9/11. In The Free Press, a vignette from a woman who as a toddler had been in daycare at the Pentagon.

At the long-established ritual of reading aloud the names of those who perished in lower Manhattan, the audience now included the victims’ grandchildren and even great-grandchildren.

Twenty five years is a long time. Many people my age have considered 9/11 a terrible tear across our life’s fabric. It was a pivot point—much akin to the attack on Pearl Harbor or the assassination of John F. Kennedy. There is a clear delineation between life that happened before and life that happened after.

I have immediate memories of life after I first learned of what had happened. I was at the local high school that morning when a student rushed in to share the news, urgently telling us to turn on the television mounted in the corner. I returned to campus. I was able to connect a phone call to my grandmother in New Jersey. I remember watching the devastation on the television in my dorm and later, on the campus quad next to the Alumni Tower, assembling with other students, gathering in the late afternoon together to consider what this all meant. I did not go to class that day. That evening, I drove into town and purchased an American flag, which I posted in the window of our room.

Today I retraced those steps, unknowingly at first when I drove past the high school to drop off our children, and then purposefully after lunch.

I hiked up the hill to the dorm where I lived in college—it’s been offline for a couple of years now, but I peeked in the lobby nonetheless at the furniture still there. I glanced up at the old window where I posted the flag. I walked back down the path next to Moore Building, shaded by 90 year-old oaks, past the library where I worked, and across to the university center and Alumni Tower and the quad where we gathered.

There were hundreds of students outside on an achingly pretty day, nearly all of whom I suspect weren’t yet born when the attacks unfolded. Here they were, dressed lightly against the warm sun, doing all of the mundane and normal and goofy and delightful things that college kids ought to be doing in the early fall semester: laughing, selling cookies for a club fundraiser, skateboarding, stretched out on the grass. A group of friends walking a dog, a couple perched on a rock wall in an embrace, two roommates talking about club sports.

It was easy to marvel in their joyful lightness, the airy nature that is a carefree Friday afternoon on a university campus.

I understand now what it means to nurse a painful day like the ones that happened in December 1941 or November 1963. And I have to believe it’s okay to celebrate this buoyant stretch of days and hours wherein this new generation has been granted a chance to simply be, to delight unburdened by the dark shadows thrown by the twin devil-plumes of collapsed buildings. To leisure in the warmth of innocence.