story6240.xml

story6240.xml

born-digital

story

yes

no

2002-09-12

I was walking down 14th Street in Manhattan when the first plane hit. I didn't see it. I was getting my hair cut in an apartment when the second one hit. I didn't see it either. The woman cutting my hair got a phone call about 10 minutes after 9am. She kept saying, "You're kidding. No f***ing way." She turned on the television and we watched for the first time the footage of what was happening a little to the west and a little to the south of where we were. We watched the towers fall. We watched the Pentagon footage. We heard about the crash in Pennsylvania. I couldn't think or feel. I was shell shocked. We went to the roof of her building and watched the smoke slowly start to envelop the city. She took pictures of it to document history. I kept turning and staring at the Empire State building wondering if it was next, or what would be. We had heard there were four more planes still in the sky. I walked home to my apartment which is four blocks from the Empire State building, seven blocks from Grand Central Station, about eight blocks from the UN, and on top of the Queens Midtown Tunnel and I was afraid. People walked by me who were covered in World Trade Center debris and I wanted to reach out and touch them, just to see if this was all really happening. I tried to call anyone I could think of who might possibly be near what was now Ground Zero. I tried to call my family to let them know I was okay, physically. I had one of the only working cell phones and I could still only make one call out of one hundred dialed. Friends were emailing and calling from across the country, they were afraid. I spent two hours sitting by myself watching the coverage on television just crying. I sat outside my building smoking stale cigarettes, talking to neighbors. We still thought there were four planes in the sky. I couldn't even think about it. I was resigned that I might be involved in the scariest thing I could ever imagine. No, I couldn't imagine it. It is unfathomable to me that a victory can be achieved by a staggering civilian death toll. Then nothing else happened. We had to close our windows because the smoke was starting to blow uptown. The next day, 9/12, the streets in Manhattan were deserted. I walked in the middle of Avenues because it was a novelty but it only made me sadder. That night there was a bomb scare in the Empire State Building. They started to evacuate my neighborhood, but they never got to my building. I didn't wait. I packed an overnight bag and walked fifty blocks uptown to my friends apartment which was not near any terrorists targets that I could identify. Her parents came and got us and took us to New Jersey. It felt so removed. It was so nice. But I still felt like someone had jumbled up my insides and didn't put everything back where it belonged. I felt off, not myself, not like anything I had ever felt before. On 9/12 I had to go back to work. I ran an educational center for children and I had to go and be strong for them. It wasn't easy. It's still not. Yesterday was the one year anniversary. I went to a morning prayer/moment of silence in Washington Square Park. I posted a message on the Union Square Town Hall board they had. I never cried, but it was so sad. And I was fortunate to have not known anyone who was killed. I'm still confused, about what happened and how I feelas a person and as a Jew, and what to do to feel better. Most of the time, I really just don't want to think about it.