September 11th

"Where are you?"  I asked my sister, emphatically.
"We are running late, I'm stuck in traffic....almost there."
"Do you know what is happening?"  I asked slowly.
"What do you mean?" she responded.
"We.... we are being attacked.  Terrorists are attacking the United States.  They have already hit the World Trade Center and the Pentagon....".
"Get here.  Get here fast.  I am afraid they are going to impose martial law.  They don't know if the attacks are finished....".
Images of blocked roads and military police filled my head.  My three year old niece was in the car with my sister. 

Alec and I spent the majority of the year 2000 traveling.  We started in Nepal, spent time in India, flew to Thailand, checked out the majority of Southeast Asia and ended our trip on an archipelago east of Flores in Indonesia, after passing through Malaysia and Singapore.  I was often asked "How was your trip?" and could never really muster an adequate answer.  I do remember mentioning once that I had been unaware that the whole world hated us.  Though it didn't define the trip, I noticed it and felt it, especially in Malaysia and in Java.  Sure, I knew that Americans aren't the most loved nationality around, but it was different experiencing it face to face when you are going out of your way to be as nice and polite as possible.

We stayed in New York a little while so that Alec could visit his family.  Shortly after our return to Atlanta, my mom offered me a secretarial job in early 2001.  I spent a lot of time reading the New York Times on the internet when I wasn't busy, which was a lot of the time.  On that pretty, clear-blue sky morning, I recall seeing a little sentence in the rolling news portion at the bottom of the Times' internet page.
"Plane hits World Trade Center"
I didn't even click the link.  I assumed it was some small plane that had basically bounced off of one of the formidable towers. Strange, a curiosity, but I had read that little planes had been known to hit the Empire State Building, too.

I kept working.  I don't remember how I heard about the second plane, but I do remember clustering with my mom in her office, hovering around the radio dialed to an AM station.  At the time, that seemed more up to date than the internet.  People were calling in, some from the actual towers.  There wasn't really a lot of reporting, but more a crowd-sourced telling of events from people on the ground or in contact with someone on the ground in New York.  Or better said, in the towers, high above New York City.

A women called, talking of her son that was trapped in one of the towers.  Somehow, his voice came on and he spoke of smoke and fire.  Caller after caller spoke through the radio.  As alarming as it was, I still somehow pictured a long day for those people and an eventual rescue.  Suddenly, things got very quiet.  The tower collapsed.

I looked at my mom and sputtered.
"But...but..they have to, they have to have evacuated those people....they have to have rescued them....., right?  They were always ugly buildings anyway...."
"Are those people we just heard dead?"
I thought of that woman, calling about her son.
"They need to get in those fighter planes and head the fuck to Afghanistan, NOW, because everyone knows who did this and they need to fucking pay."
I wanted it.  Right then and there, even while the smoke still filled the air.

My step-dad brought in a television and we hovered around it the rest of the day.  The phones didn't even ring.  Everyone had stopped everything.

Details trickled out that day and the following days and months, some that would hold a principal role in the memory of the events and some that would disappear.  How many more cities would be hit?  Every plane in the air could be a weapon.  Fighter jets threatened to shoot down commercial airliners that did not respond to radio contact.  Hospitals braced for the injured that would never come.  They all died.  People lined up to give blood that wasn't needed.  A plane crashed in Pennsylvania, what was its destination?  Where would the next plane hit?  Was it over, were the attacks over?  Crude box cutters became the worst weapon anyone could think of.  Tales of men that went to flying classes but never wanted to learn how to land the plane.  The horror of the jumpers, people faced with the decision to be burned alive or crushed, or to jump from one of the tallest buildings in the world.  The images of them and the apocalyptic sounds they made when they landed.  Our president was circling the country in the air, because it was not safe for him to land on U.S. soil.   There was talk of whether or not to rebuild, if they did rebuild would anyone rent office space on the tallest floors?  Should office workers in skyscrapers be equipped with parachutes?  American airspace was closed, indefinitely.  I looked at my passport and felt trapped, I couldn't leave even if I tried.  Much of the government was in an "undisclosed location".  The subsequent demands that everyone be vigilant and go back to work; Osama bin Laden wanted to destroy our economy and it wouldn't happen if we got back to work.  A fire like the core of the earth raged where the towers once were.  It would take months to put out. 

I finally went home and waited for Alec.  The restaurant he worked at had stayed open all day.  Neither of us used cell phones at the time and when he came in, I wanted to know what he knew.
"We listened on the radio.  They attacked the World Trade Center."
"Alec, the towers are gone....they collapsed."
A look of shock crossed his face.
"Have you considered calling your family?"

Two days later, we "celebrated" our fifth anniversary.  As we sat outside at a normally busy restaurant, the silence induced by the lack of planes in the sky seemed deafening.  My back hurt from sitting without moving in front of the television for days.

One afternoon in the days following the attacks, I stood in the street with several other people, staring at the sky.  Low flying Blackhawk helicopters flew lowly over the neighborhood.
"I think it's a presence, a show of force to make us feel protected...." one guy said skeptically.
"Those bombs hanging off of the bottom of the thing don't make me feel so protected."  another responded.

In a matter on months we would be back in New York for another heartbreaking event.  As our plane banked Lower Manhattan, the area where the towers once stood was vacant, save for flood lights and a massive cloud of smoke.