If one asked me eight years ago which countries in the world I would want to visit at utmost, I would have still enthusiastically answered with: "the United States!"

However, after that 9/11 attack, I've no longer kept those dreams to visit America.

While thousands of death tolls and their families and friends are direct victims of the terrorism tragedy, there are those who are indirect victims, with even larger number (at least I believe so).

And me, with my very typical Muslim women's appearance, is just one of the latter.

Of course, as terrorism is often linked -- if not immediately associated, with Islam -- most people will likely think that non-Muslims, especially Americans and perhaps other Westerners, are potential victims of terrorism, while we Muslims are the culprits (or the terrorists, if ones reading this post can't help saying so).

This is not what I want to discuss in this posting. Shortly I will say confidently, 'NO, we are not terrorists as one of you or others think we are'.

If you think every Muslim is a copy of Osama bin Laden, I would say that it is like you think that every human is albino, which is not, because albinos, as well as Muslim terrorists (if they are indeed there) are anomaly.

What I want to say is that the 9/11 attack has truly taken one of its tolls on me. More specifically, on a dreamer me.

As I wrote at the beginning of this posting, I had always dreamed of flying to the US. I watch its movies, listen to its music and use its language. I wish to study at one of the universities there, many of which are regarded as the world's best universities.
I want to go to Chicago, which is a headquarter of my once favorite basketball team Chicago Bulls (when Michael Jordan was still there). I want to cross
the Mississippi River in style (as Huckleberry Finn did), want to visit Laura Ingalls' little house on the prairie and wander around the city where Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy March could have spent their teenage...and so on.

But, then, after the 9/11 attack took place and we Muslims became terrorist suspects, I see my pair of wings broken and they have yet to mend even until now. I see no hopes for me to fly to America, to step my feet at what was once the land of my dreams.

How would I ever do such things when my Muslim identity, the one I can never let go, becomes a source of suspicions of security guards and those blindly keeping their Islamophobia?

My "American dreams" have since gone as so have my hopes to visit the country without raising the stupid suspicions.

I have years ago shifted my eyes toward Europe, the United Kingdom in particular. Unfortunately, while I felt that my partiality toward the country was growing amiably stronger and stronger, I had to face the fact that London, too, has turned unfriendly to people like me since the 2005 bombings. And Denmark, Germany and French just follow.

Well, well, well, now I don't know if I'm still eager to visit the UK. I wish I could still visit peaceful Switzerland, inhaling fresh air of the Alps and enjoying its beauty; or explore the Northern forests, in which I could perhaps see beavers' nest and lakes, as well as see the rows of fir trees or colorful autumn leaves.

I hope no terrorists will ever attack those places because if they do, then it will be the end of my dreams days and I will have to get stuck in this hot, humid tropical country called the Unitary Republic of Indonesia, a beautiful archipelago, actually, but a little too messy here and there.

Can you see it now? Me, a 100% percent Muslim, is also a victim of terrorism, the reason why I hate the crime so deeply (in addition to the fact that it killed so may innocent people).