My 9/11 Story

I was in New York on September 11, 2001. I sometimes feel like I don't have as much right to the day as those who were actually at the towers, but like any thinking, feeling American (and beyond), the day changed me forever. No longer did I feel the invincibility that had previously been characteristic of my still-young generation.

Here's a portion of the email I send to everyone I knew later that day. After a bit of thought, I'm not including the last section which is a statement of faith that doesn't quite describe what I believe eight years later. Anyway, here it is:

Tuesday morning. I got off of the subway on the corner of Broadway and Prince, half a block from where I work in Manhattan. For those of you who are not familiar with the geography of Manhattan, it's a very long island and Broadway runs vertically the entire length of it. My office is in SoHo, very far down, but not in the area considered "downtown," where all the financial buildings are. I was walking down the west side of the street with another woman from my work when I saw a small but growing crowd on the east side of the street looking south. I thought they must have been looking at some movie shoot or celebrity down the street, as SoHo frequently sees that kind of activity. Except that they were, strangely, looking up. We did too and saw smoke in the sky. The woman I was with walked partway into the street and said, "It's the World Trade Center." I though for sure she was joking, so I crossed the street too and as I did, saw the sky fill with white dots and sparkles. Paper and glass. Soon I'd learn this was debris from the second plane hitting the south tower.

As some of my colleagues and I went up to the seventh floor of my building (east side of the street on Broadway) we heard a rumor of a plane crash. All we could say was how it was like something out of a movie, and how stupid could someone be to fly into the WTC. If you've never been here, it's hard to convey how massive these buildings are. Look at the remaining buildings on the news. Those are about the size of the tallest buildings in Seattle. Now look at how the WTC overshadows them. To stand underneath them was so overwhelming; all you could do was marvel at their size. You can see them from miles around, the only point in Manhattan visible from all the boroughs and NJ. Our Towers of Babel.

Once in the office, the 11 of us who made it there were glued to CNN. By now it was determined that two passenger planes were hijacked and flown in to the buildings. Overwhelming. We were in shock. I opened the windows and leaned out, looking south down Broadway, and saw the smoke billowing out. It was surreal. We drank coffee and tried to make phone calls, to little avail, all trying to glean more information from the newscast. Now the Pentagon was hit. One of my coworkers remarked that if this were a movie, no one would believe it. Then they announced the crumbling of the South Tower. Unbelievable. I ran to the window and saw the image firsthand of just one tower standing. This, to me, was more poignant than both of them gone. They're always seen as a unit, and to see neither of them feels more like a hallucination than reality. But the image of just one standing, and the smoke that began to crawl up the street and settled just six blocks down, is what really hit me. Each time we thought that we’d had the final hit, something even bigger happened. What was next? I was just a mile away. A bomb or missile hit that just barely missed another downtown or midtown target could easily hit where I was. I was alive, but a deep feeling of my own mortality hit me. The glass bubble of invincibility that my generation lives in was shattered. All I could do was drop to my knees and whisper to God, “Thank you, thank you.”

Looking down at the street, emergency vehicles tried to get past the few cars that remained. The exodus of people walking north was chilling. We soon joined them and I walked with co-workers past lines of people at pay phones and crowds of people in stores, silent as they tried to hear radios or watch televisions. It’s hard to describe the looks on the faces of people I passed. Shock, sickness, inability to understand what was taking place.

I waited at my co-worker’s apartment on 13th Street, stranded in Manhattan until the trains were running again to Brooklyn. I got home around 4:00 and spent the night at Tina’s down the street. All of us were and still are unable to peel our eyes off of the television.

I am so grateful to you all. Six calls that went through on my cell phone, 12 new messages at home, and 36 new emails. I’m sorry, but it’s a lot to try to return them all individually right now. I’m okay, as is everyone I know. But so many people are not. Aparna has people staying with her who are now homeless, their apartment buildings victim to the falling debris.

Funny how drastically your perspective of what's urgent changes all in a moment. I can’t go to work today, but at least I still have a company to go to. I have a home. I have my friends and loved ones.

Now would be a good time, as many of you have already, to pray for all these people who have been the victims of hate, for their families, for the world-altering decisions that are going to be made very soon.

I love you all, and am praying for you.
Ciara