On September 11th, 2001, I was staying in a hostel which sat on the northern edge of Central Park in Harlem. I was moving to New York City after having graduated from journalism school a few months before, and was staying there until I found an apartment. It sounds fantastical, but I had intended to go up to the top of the south tower that morning to the observation deck, which I only just learned about the weekend before at a party of some acquaintances. The man who told me about it lived just a couple of blocks away from the towers, and I remember standing outside on that Saturday night, gazing up the long stretch of all that metal, glass, and artificial light, into the dark distance in the sky. "You can go up in them? Huh. I could do that on Tuesday…"
I overslept that morning. And when I woke up and got ready, I walked into the foyer of the hostel, to see the first images of the south tower burning from a small T.V. set suspended from the ceiling in the corner of room. Then, the news was reporting it as an accident. Not knowing how big this was, I grabbed my camera bag which at the time had only two rolls of film (film!), one camera body, and one lens in it, and immediately took the A train southbound to get to where the towers were. Mid-route, I spoke with other passengers to try to learn more about the situation. No one knew anything. The conductor said the train was going out of service, and that the last stop would be Chambers and West Broadway. Everyone had to get out. We emerged from the underground, five blocks away from the towers, to see that now both towers had been hit and were in flames. The realization that the crisis was so much bigger and scarier and unexplainable slowly bubbled up inside me. "What is happening? Who did this? What does it all mean?" I began making pictures of what I saw around me. Some were quietly watching, some crying, some on their cell phones. I cannot remember how long I was there -- 5 minutes, 10? -- before the south tower started to cascade down to the earth, turning a 100 floors of life and concrete, steel, and glass to dust, which would cover lower Manhattan, and hang in the air for weeks before fully being washed from the sky.
When the first tower began to fall, frightened people ran past me, hitting both of my shoulders as I tried to crouch down to make a picture. A police officer yelled for everyone to run northward, and others were dazed behind her.
Today, my brother Ted, sent me a text message, saying that he always thinks of me on this day because our family was worried about what had happened to me, since we weren't able to get in touch with each other until later on that evening. They knew that I would have gone down to be close to it all. My mother left me a heart-stabbing voicemail urging me to call her. I feel in her voice that she feared I had died. I kept that voicemail for a long time, and I still wish I had it, but that was many cell phones ago. And why should I want it? Thirteen years now have passed, and it "seems like another life now," Teddy wrote.
Yesterday I showed my pictures from 9/11 to my Photography One students, high schoolers who were two-, three-, or four-years-old then. For them, 9/11 is a part of the fabric of their worldview; they cannot imagine life before it. Like a fish in water.
It's another 9/11 anniversary, and I sit here as the day finishes, quiet, with cicadas squeaking outside, nearly a 1,000 miles away from where I stood thirteen years ago. My memories are as crisp as they were that bright, cloudless day. My thoughts are with those who did lose a beloved family member that day, or, like my friend, Petra, nearly all of her coworkers who died in the attack. We all keep moving, going, changing, and that day still remains just as powerful as it was then, and, really -- incomprehensible.