9/11/01

9/11/01 felt like one long moment. A moment that seemed to last for days, then weeks, then months, then years. I don’t know when the 9/11 moment ended for me, but eventually the vision from my Brooklyn rooftop of the first tower slipping towards the center of the earth amidst a cloud of dust became a memory.

I was brushing my teeth that morning, getting ready to go to work. “It’s a perfectly clear day, except for that strange lone cloud above the World Trade Center,” I thought to myself then. I had a distant view of Lower Manhattan from my apartment on 25th Street and 5th Avenue in Brooklyn. Still groggy from sleep and on auto-pilot, I turned on my TV which poured out loud static on all stations. I stopped on one that I could at least hear. “A small passenger plane has crashed into the World Trade Center,” I remember the anchorwoman reporting. She didn’t sound panicked.

I headed over to the window and that’s when I realized why that cloud above the towers looked so surreal. By that time my roommate, Bryant Wang, had woken up and I was explaining the news to him in shocked tones. We winced at the TV, trying to make out an image, trying to follow along on the screen to what would’ve been plainly obvious if we had looked out the window. Moments later, the TV told us that a second plane had struck the other tower.

We rushed over to the window and saw a new cloud billowing over Lower Manhattan. It looked so far away. It didn’t look like a film or a dream. It didn’t feel surreal. It was surreality itself. It was more real than what was inside of me.

I got a call from my boss at Creative Capital Foundation not to come in until further notice, so Bryant and I watched a little more TV to get information. We learned that flights were canceled, that America’s airspace was restricted, that this might be the work of terrorists, that fighter jets could shoot down an airplane if it was deemed an imminent threat, that evacuations were happening in the towers, that people were jumping out of them. We learned that another plane had crashed into the Pentagon. The scale of these events and their proximity suddenly became too much think about. We shook our heads at eachother.

Then we went up to our roof where the view of the city was clear, like a perfectly focused photograph. The towers stood there, burning. Fires used to overwhelm and consume major cities like this one and the one I grew up around, San Francisco. Looking at the scene, I was thinking about how to describe it to family and friends back in Bay Area who I knew would be getting in touch as soon as they woke up. “‘Surreal’ just doesn’t begin to describe it,” I thought.

Suddenly the first tower crumbled to the ground. It disappeared and I could faintly hear it go. My knees weakened and I remember thinking that we at least were left with one more tower. I couldn’t imagine the other also succumbing, though it was burning in the same way. And when it did a little later, I felt foolish for being so hopeful.

When the calls came in, I said the same things over and over. “It was surreal. I’m fine. I can’t believe it. I’m shocked. I don’t know.” A dark cloud brought by a wind coming from the West approached us and we could see the ominous shadow it cast as it made its way over. We waited for it like a fast forward night. The darkness brought a rain of paper and a mist of dust. We picked up office documents written in Japanese. The cloud moved on and we later moved back downstairs to watch the news. The reception was a little better.

We watched the news repeat itself for hours, and I was intoxicated by the constancy of it. The news was like a wall. It was there the whole time and I grew to hate it for simply being there.