9/11: Before, When & After (raw & unedited)

BEFORE
Plucked from “My New York: Then and Now” …
Six months prior to September 11, 2001, I was on top of the world. At 110 stories high, almost 1,400 feet, I apathetically posed for a picture with my best friend Paige in front of a gray late-winter sky. We were 16-year-olds with short attention spans, exhausted from avenue after avenue, still adjusting to the frigid East Coast air – validation for little interest in another New York landmark. I had already made up my mind that Manhattan was an intense, curious, fascinating place, so it didn’t matter much on that blistery March evening that where I stood was somewhere I’d never be able to again – on top of the World Trade Center. My father brought us to the big city for our junior year spring break in 2001. Like most young Southerners, everything I knew about New York was based on history classes or television shows or required reading. At 16, the idea of New York was intriguing, but New York as a place seemed suspicious and inconceivable. How could one tiny island boast so much history and authority and magic? It was as if New Yorkers knew and possessed something we all didn’t – and little did I know, I’d spend the next 10 years trying to figure out what that was. 

TUESDAY, September 11, 2001 – Where were you?
Tuesday, the 11^th was the first day some fellow rebel cheerleaders and I were serving in-school suspension for skipping classes the previous week.(That uniform usually saved us from serious consequences, but we were being used as “examples” to prove that as school role models – ha! – were not exempt from the rules.) While walking through the hallways that morning, I remember hearing a teacher say to another that she thought a plane had crashed into a building in New York, and thinking how peculiar and erroneous that sounded, and even more so, how casually she said it, as if she had just said, I think I’m having a sandwich for lunch. The few of us, along with other “troublemakers,” sat in a cramped temporary building in small isolated cubicles sleeping or plotting ways to escape (I may have written really lame poetry instead). And no one said a word, especially about New York. After an hour or so of being trapped in that remote hellhole, and just as I had finished another line of what I’m sure was profound verse, an office worker came in and informed us that a few of our parents were here to pick us up. Mom didn’t really have much an explanation in the car (I’m afraid no one did), but she had reason to believe I didn’t need to be away from her, even half-way across the country from “what had happened.” We sat at the dining room table and watched it all unfold again and again and again on TV, not knowing exactly, along with the rest of the world, the magnitude of what we were witnessing. I remember feeling a deep ache within me though, a terrible sadness, an inexplicable rage. But it was something I didn’t and couldn’t truly feel until I became a part of it.  

AFTER
I know it’s a strange thought, but I think I became a New Yorker when I stood on top of the World Trade Center that winter in 2001. Not by the common definition, of course, and not even to my own knowledge, but I became one…the seed was planted, the city was destined to be a part of me. And it grew on that horrifying, bewildering, heartbreaking September morning. For some, the tragedy of 9/11 took seconds to comprehend, digest, literally feel; for others, like myself, it took standing at Ground Zero my first week of moving to Manhattan (in May of 06), witnessing that devastating hole in the ground, knowing and feeling the holes it had left in so many people’s lives and in their hearts. I stared hopelessly at the site and the names on the wall, and after I wiped away the tears, I got angry. I was angry people around me were smiling. I was angry there were so many unanswered questions. I was angry I was not here in 2001 to help, to feel what these New Yorkers felt. I was angry so many innocent people had lost their lives in such a tragic, impossible way. And when I realized my anger wouldn’t and couldn’t change the past, I channeled that anger into pride. I was proud to be a part of a city that came together, that stayed together, that showed the rest of the world what it meant to be an American and a New Yorker and a humble human being. That ache that we feel for the victims and their families will never go away and it will never compare to those who were directly affected. The stories will always be difficult to read, the pictures will always break our hearts, lower Manhattan will always evoke a range of emotions, but we will remember what this city has seen, what it has been through and how, as New Yorkers, we are better than ever.

Nothing can shake the love I have for this city. It is in my heart, it is who I am. I am so lucky and thankful to know what it means to be a New Yorker. Today, more than ever, and always.