---Waking up to my best friends voice crying and screaming out of my answering machine asking me to call her and tell her that I was OK. (I was scheduled to be at the World Trade Center at 8 am to take my licensure exam and cancelled the day before because I am a lazy ass who cannot function mentally before noon).
---Turning on the TV and seeing planes fly into buildings that were a mile from me. Wondering if this was a movie, seriously wondering if this was real. Blinking, blinking and realizing that yes, it was. A few Radio and TV stations were no more due to their transmitters being located at the top of the World Trade Center.
---Grabbing the phone and calling my boyfriend who was supposed to be on the train under the WTC on his way to work in Brooklyn at that exact time. Screaming when he answered the phone at his job and just crying and crying and crying at hearing his voice. He decided to drive that day.
---Throwing clothes on and running outside and seeing people walking around in a daze, some crying, some scared, anxious, people talking to each other out of fear and wondering if it was over or if more was coming.
----My boyfriend coming home to me and standing in the doorway and hugging each other for a very, very long time. Then crying and laying on the couch in silence and just looking at each other and wondering what was going to happen to us and to the world. Not leaving the house for 3 days. Everything being closed except the occasional deli or food store. Waking up the first few nights from the sound of helicopters flying overhead and just hovering in place for hours on end.
----Hearing stories everyday for weeks afterward that bridges were being shut down, men were caught with bomb building materials and arrested, etc etc. Bomb scares on a daily basis. Everywhere. Grand central station was next. Being a little afraid to go into high rise buildings. Living in a military zone. Seeing the national guard and guns everywhere.
----The smell. The horrible horrible smell. Burning electrical wires and flesh. wafting into my windows for months afterward. It took forever for that smell to go away. Sometimes, I think I still smell it.
----Photographs of happy, smiling people with the word "missing" next to their faces. These flyer's were everywhere. There were walls and walls of them. A large one at Union Square. Even at my grocery store, Laundromat and gym.
----Morgue trucks in the streets filled with dead bodies. Reports of body parts and bones being recovered on rooftops and odd places on a daily basis.
----A good friends boyfriend's body being found. He was a Port Authority Police officer. She called him for days. Wondered if he was buried in the rubble. He never answered that phone. He was found 3 months later.
----This same friends children looking up to the sky as they came out of Century 21 from shopping and seeing bodies falling out of buildings and dropping to the ground right in front of them.
----My boyfriends Uncle running for his life from those buildings as he got his morning coffee from the cart in front and saw and heard the planes go into those buildings. He ran all the way across the bridge to Brooklyn with thousands of other people who were in shock and terrified. His mother telling him that he looked like a soldier coming home from a war as he walked into her kitchen covered in white dust and soot from head to toe.
-----A friend telling me about how she was on the phone with her niece who was on the 102 floor, listening to her cry as the buildings started to collapse around her.
----People I worked with volunteering at ground zero and going down after work everyday to help out.
----People being kind and patient to one another. Listening to each other and trying to help and do whatever needed to be done.
----Hearing from people I had not heard from in years, just "checking up" to see if I was still alive.
If you were not here, you may think you know what it was like from watching the news or reading about it. Trust me on this, you do not really know. You cannot even begin to imagine it. And even now, there are occasional stories about plots that have been uncovered since, and things have never been the same since. I don't think about it on a daily basis, it doesn't affect how I live my life at all but somewhere in the back of my head, the innocence that once was is gone, things have drastically changed forever. Even today, there are ads all over the subway offering services to people who have physical or psychological symptoms related to this event. Most people who lived through this are keenly aware that anything can and just might happen when you least expect it to.
My sincere condolences go out to everyone who was affected by this event and lived through it. There is nothing more to say about this except that my greatest wish is that people never ever forget this and the horror of it. Maybe if we can manage to do that we will truly treat each other with the respect and love that often seems to be missing between us.
God bless.
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