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Six years ago, I was running across the bridge spanning the width of the West Side Highway to Stuyvesant. I was late for orchestra class yet again. To my left, I heard a deep boom. Puzzled, I stopped and looked around. Did a pile driver have a false start? The area had seen the sprouting of many residential buildings within the past few years, so I was accustomed to the sounds of repeated pounding of metal upon earth chasing me through my classes. Yet I had only heard a singular impact. I was too worried about being reprimanded by my orchestra teacher though to explore the matter further.
In class, I slid into my chair and quickly assembled my violin. My best friend caught my eye and grinned. So far, the director had not noticed my tardiness. I took deep breaths to stop the gasping from the running. Minutes later, another girl came running in late and breathless, informed people around her that a plane had flown into one of the Twin Towers. That sound I heard…it was…but before I could make the connection, I heard it again.
What followed after consisted predominantly of the deepest anxiety and fear I had ever felt. I never figured out the path I had taken to my aunt's home, only that I had to have walked far north out of danger before cutting east across the island and head back south. My cousins had the misfortune to live at the tip of Manhattan, complicating my return back to their apartment. For one they we sat trapped, helplessly watching the long tail of smoke waft up from the hole day after day from their living room windows. After that week of ever-increasing cabin fever, my aunt and I ventured out.
We walked around Chinatown. It was empty, emptier than I had ever seen it before. All the metal gates were drawn over the storefronts. The cars and trucks that normally congested Canal Street had been replaced by a few army tanks and large dump trucks shuttling refuse between the former WTC and the barges floating in the East River. The dust that the tanks tracked from the site and rumbled into the air gave the impression that we were walking in the midst of nuclear fallout.
A month later I was back at Stuy. As soon as we had been given notice from the EPA that the air quality around our school building was safe enough to breathe, we went back. I had nearly forgotten my locker’s location by that time, having been at school for only four days before the attacks. But no matter. We just wanted to return to normalcy after having been left abruptly and sharply in suspended animation.
That normalcy would never return. I couldn’t use the subway for the longest time after returning to Stuy. When the attacks occurred, people in the trains in the general vicinity were trapped for hours, sitting in the dark and completely unaware of what was happening while their conductors, scared and confused, struggled to bring the trains to a station not already overwhelmed by the people fleeing homeward. I couldn’t bear to be stranded like that, so I walked.
But walking itself was no better. I could see the rubble clearly from six blocks away as I emerged from the school building, knowing that the unique smell emanating from the site contained the cremated remains of three thousand people, along with vaporized metal and pulverized concrete. Army personnel, their eyebrows knit tight, searched the faces of the pedestrians walking past. But their faces were a mirror of our own.
About halfway, I passed by the police department’s headquarters. Before the attacks, I could walk through the middle of the plaza, unhindered by any security precautions. But afterwards I walked hunched forward around the perimeter under the gaze of sharpshooters perched on the headquarters’ roof. I was always afraid they would mistake me for a terrorist or that I would be caught in crossfire, that without warning they’d shoot in my direction and I would die at any second. We were not yet at war, but I knew that from the anxiety painfully tightening my chest that I was living in something very akin to a war zone.
Even now, I feel the same tightening. I can barely breathe for embarrassment that my fear will escape me and people would regard me with wonder and disdain. For they have forgotten the fear of that day and approach the anniversary date with fleeting awareness, solemn reflection, and then passing irrelevance to their activities. They have been able to continue on with their lives.
I don’t blame them. They weren’t there. They saw only pictures on a screen that, though traumatic as they were, were incomplete. They don’t panic as I did when I was sitting in the backseat of a friend’s car, convinced that a plane would fly into the Prudential Center when in fact it was flying miles behind the building. They do not, as I did, blurt out “It’s September Eleventh,” when people ask why the flag is at half-staff that day, and then turn my face to the window, not willing to respond to their comments of having forgotten.
God, how the pain hurts. But it will never leave, dulling only with time I am told.
_________________ 
"One day you'll wake up realizing you really do care about her... and when that day comes, she'll wake up next to a guy that already knows..."
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