nmah6419.xml

nmah6419.xml

born-digital

story

yes

no

2004-01-26

I am a New Yorker. Born in Manhattan, raised in Brooklyn, and commuter to middle and high school in Manhattan. Yet on the day that the buildings came down, I was fifty miles away at college in Princeton, NJ. Although we were at school, classes had not yet started and thus, like most college kids,I was using the opportunity to sleep late. That is until my roomate burst into my room. "Min, I'm sorry to wake you, but the twin towers have come down, and they've hit buildings in Washington too." Not believing what I was hearing, I ran down the hallway to watch tv in a neighbor's room.
The story my roomate had told me was true.
And yet it seemed like it wasn't. When we broke away from the tv, got dressed and went to another campus building, we realized that it was a gorgeous day, the type only possible on college campuses in late summer. It was hard to believe that at home, in my city, buildings were falling down and people running for their lives. I'd tried calling my parents, but no luck, all the phones were down. Our neighbors, both of whom worked in the WTC were also out of touch, not to mention the dozens of my parent's friends who worked right near by.
Later that day, watching tv in yet another friend's dorm room I just kept repeating out loud what I was seeing: "look there's Stuyvesant, where so many of my friends went to school, there's BMCC, there's the Brooklyn Bridge that I used to cross most days going to school." And the only real comment I remember from a friend: "wow, for us it's just scary, but Minda actually knows where that is and what's going on. Makes it that much more scary."
When I finally got through to my parents in Brooklyn I found out just how close we really were to Manhattan. Stationary with addresses in the WTC had landed in our front yard. My sister, at school in Manhattan, was stuck there for 2 days until she could safely come home by subway. In the following days we started school, and started crying. For me, an avid New York Times reader, reaidng the stories about the attacks was fine. But the ads placed in the country by cities and other countries around the world offering NY their support were what made me cry. I returned home to NY four days after the attacks and looked around me in the subway. The amazing thing was that people were still going about their daily business. Until I was home, riding that subway, I couldn't imagine that it was possible. But it was, and slowly, over time, we're all healing.