i was asleep, and i was on the east coast of the US (not terribly far from NYC). i had come back from europe a week or two earlier, and had actually just come back from new york that sunday night where i was visiting friends i hadn't seen in well over a year. i'd actually spent the night with a friend (
) just a block or two from the WTC and i remember thinking that i was going to go up to the top of the towers the next time i was in NYC.
anyway, i had no idea what was going to happen that fall -- i'd had a small downpayment on a round-the-world plane ticket, and was planning to lie low and live at home and work during the fall, and then head out in January for another few months of traveling before coming back home and applying to graduate school.
anyway, i woke up around 9:45, and went to check my email. up on AOL there was a newstory about an airplane that had crashed into the WTC, and i remember thinking, "what kind of idiot in a Cessna flies into the freaking world trade center." i also hoped no one was killed, but was sure a few people probably would be due to the plane's impact.
i went downstairs, made coffee, made toast, flipped through the morning paper, totally oblivious, and then sat down and filpped on the TV right as the second tower was collapsing. i changed the channel. what was this? it seemed like a movie, a bad Bruckheimer/Michael Bay piece of crap. but it was on the next channel. then the next. then the next. it took at good 15 minutes to finally figure out what was going on. then the phone started ringing. one friend called to tell me that my friend and his girlfriend who were living in NYC were all right, and that another mutual friend who was in the Navy was pretty much awaiting orders to be sent somewhere. i remember thinking this was totally to be expected, that this was like Pearl Harbor, and we were going to be at war. then my mother called. nearly hysterical. her best friend's husband worked in one of the towers. and my best friend's brother-in-law (who'd just had a baby). and there were others. and i suddenly remembered a few classmates. in all, there were probably close to a dozen people we were worried about. she started listing all the rumors she had heard -- another airplane went down, there was an attack on the Pentagon, there were more airplanes up in the air that no one had any contact with. bridges were being shut down. other major towers evacuated. it was mind-boggling, and i remember feeling grateful to be in a quiet CT suburb, away from the action. and death.
the rest of the day was spent sending emails. making phone calls and checking in with people. i remember talking to Vanessa, my best friend's sister, and her husband was okay, barely, as he had been evacuated just in time and he literally sprinted down the street just a few feet ahead of the ashes and debris as the towers fell. she said she had been sitting in front of the TV all day, calling his cell phone, holding her baby. he had called to say that he had been evacuated, but that he was on the ground, and wasn't sure what to do. then he hung up. and then the towers fell, and she wasn't sure if he'd gotten far enough away from the building.
my mother's best friend's husband walked all the way home to Brooklyn, covered in ashes. one of my classmates from college died. gradually, a head count came in, and most of the people we knew were okay, but then the stories start of people who you didn't know you sort of knew, and now they were dead.
the two feelings i remember were both disbelief, and also clarity. it was incredibly surreal, completely unbelievable, yet there was a sense of duty and purpose. i had thought about giving blood, but then remembered that gay men aren't allowed to donate blood, so i made a financial donation to the red cross.
at dinner that night, my parents and my sister (my brother was in college) worked out a broadly worded plan to escape/flee should something else awful happen, especially something nuclear. that we'd agree to meet at the house, grab the dog, grab a few things, and then drive west to grab my brother. and then keep going?
we weren't sure what to do.
i stayed up late that night, watching TV, and trying to absorb the magnitude of what had happened.
5 years later, it's actually a bigger deal than i think anyone could have ever anticipated. not the event itself, but in what the event itself has inspired.
i wish it had never happened. but it was going to happen. in retrospect, it seems inevitable.
So I woke up and turned the TV on at about 8:30am, and was in total shock. I was waiting for my husband to come home after taking my daughter to school, and I believe that's when he found out about it from other parents
