The sky was so blue. No clouds. A perfect New York morning. I left my Windsor Terrace apartment and walked to the train.
I worked in far Midtown West for a dot-com. It was the first day of school, and the last day of the innocent summers wrapped in joyful debauchery for me and my friends: young and free in New York in the mid-to-late '90s.
We came up out of the elevated track near Bergen Street in Brooklyn. There it was: the view. Lower Manhattan in all its splendor.
The conductor came on and made an announcement: “The World Trade Center has been hit by a plane.” It was just one plane at this point, presumably an accident, but I knew. We weren't naive. The Trade Center had been bombed before.
The tower was blowing an exhaust of black smoke, with sparkling bits mixed in. I remember seeing the trail of metallic glint blowing back into Brooklyn and out over the river.
Amazingly, I continued on to work. We went below ground.
I got off in Midtown and made my way through the tunnels and steps to come out on the west side. I went into the deli near my office and got a bagel, the same as any other day. I heard people talking: it was a small plane that had hit; it was an accident. I went up to my desk and sat at my computer to try to understand what was happening.
Another plane had hit. Then we all knew. It was terrifying. It felt like anything could happen. I talked to my dad from my desk phone. He told me he had watched it on television from his office in Philadelphia, and that it felt just like watching a building they intentionally blow up to collapse. They were gone.
I was in Manhattan, but hadn't seen more than the first tower burning. Some people went out on a little fire escape and watched them collapse. We evacuated the office. People were crying as we walked to the freight elevator. I was numb.
Walking outside, it was chaotic. I made my way to Sixth Avenue. People were massed in the street, cars pulled over with the windows down, playing 1010 WINS. Tinny news updates floated in the air. We were all marching south, down to a column of smoke where the towers had been. I kept walking.
I made it to Houston. I couldn't go farther south. I wanted to get to the Manhattan or Brooklyn Bridge, as that was the closest path, but the roads down were shut off by the NYPD.
I walked across the Williamsburg Bridge. I was in the column of people marching out of Manhattan: women covered in white dust and torn stockings, men with blazers over their shoulders and briefcases. An F-15 screamed over us. It was too late. I looked up at it, and back at the column of smoke. They were really gone.
I kept walking. I walked all the way home to Windsor Terrace. I got to Prospect Park, my territory. The lawn was empty. I cut across and made my way back to 13th Avenue. My dog was surprised to see me. I was mad. The world had just changed.
In the days following, there was a moment for New Yorkers. The country was in shock, mourning, rallying, and enraged, but in New York City there was a brief time when we were all in it together: kindness, candles on front stoops, American flags on flagpoles, people hanging out of cabs and windows. We were American, but we were New Yorkers first.
There were walls of tattered papers of missing people, overlapping each other in futility. We went to funerals for firefighters we didn't know as the bombs started to fall on the other side of the world.
It's important to express what the World Trade Center meant to me, to my friends, to New Yorkers, to all of us. It was the symbol of New York, in a way that showed what made us different, what we were capable of: not just one, but two.
I could see them from the tops of hills in New Jersey. After spending some painful time away visiting relatives, driving on the highway and seeing them on the horizon was like seeing a beacon, a lighthouse, calling me home. I went to the top of the World Trade Center with my sister, looking out through the glass windows. We used to skate in the shadow of the towers at the Brooklyn Banks, take the PATH and subway from its depths, sit at the Cortlandt Street N station late at night in the summer, wondering when the train would come.
From rooftops on the LES, to hilltops in New Jersey, out of bus windows and from the backseat of cars on the Turnpike, every day at lunch at Prep, looming over me in high school: I would stare at them, twin giants, reassuring us that New York was still open and alive. Nighttime light shows watched from every angle, yellow beams above the clouds.