Taking a page from Citymama. I was living abroad when 9/11 happened, but I am a life-long New Yorker, and worked in Manhattan for several years before moving abroad. If any city is my city, New York was, and still is, it. On the tragic day, I was actually in London, visiting a friend. I was supposed to be on a flight on 9/12, returning to New York. Instead, I was on the London Eye when the first plane struck.
I knew something was wrong the moment we walked into a pub, after our ride on the Eye. There was absolute silence, except for one woman openly weeping, and everyone was standing in a huddle, eyes riveted on the sole Television screen hanging above the bar. I looked at the screen as the first building disintegrated.
The next few days were a blur. I managed to get in touch with some American friends at LBS and was invited to a memorial. Many there knew people who had perished in the towers. One had just left Cantor Fitzgerald to pursue her studies at LBS.
I also remember crossing a busy intersection in Kensington, and seeing a young man standing in the middle divider, waving an enormous American flag. When I told him that I was American and asked him why he was doing that, he told me that he felt so powerless but just had to do something. I burst into tears.
I was on the first international plane to land in JFK after 9/11. Despite the hundreds of travelers that had been stranded in London when the planes were grounded, tightened security meant that the plane was less than half full. I managed to get on by waiting at the airport for 18 hours before the flight took off. Everyone applauded when the plane touched the tarmac.
The day after I returned to New York, I walked down Broadway as far south as I could before being stopped by the police barricades. There were street vendors hawking WTC gold, there were flowers and candles lain in front of a local fire station, there were yellow ribbons tied on wire fences, there were those thousands and thousands of missing posters covering every upright surface block after block after block. The city was quiet, not frenetic. People were overwhelmingly sad, but friendly.
I wrote this after I returned to Asia:
I turn on the TV and head for CNN automatically. If the TV could be like my web browser, I would have CNN set as my homepage. As it is, I can only hope that my roommates have not changed the channel recently, or risk losing precious seconds of the “continuing coverage”.
So many people in New York say that in lower Manhattan, the only way to orient yourself when leaving the warm and steamy confines of the subway is to look for the glittering duo of the World Trade Center. So when the newspapers report that people in Manhattan walk the streets in a daze, looking lost, it seems so obviously relatable to the loss of these markers, these directional icons.
I usually take the 1/9 south. I get out at Canal, where I can find Chinatown, my favorite art supply store and the best 2nd hand clothing stores in town. And no matter how often I take that line, I still find myself completely mystified when I hit street level, leaving behind the dull thunder of the next approaching train. There is always the immediate mist of apprehension: did I get off at the wrong stop? Why does this street look so different? And then as quickly, a heady rush of comprehension when I look up and see the twin towers, so permanent, so immobile, so there. That way is south, I say to myself, and I recover my New York sense of purpose, taking my long New York strides towards my final destination.
When they amputated the city, it was like they amputated my sense of direction as well.
I suddenly find myself standing in the middle of a local intersection, an intersection I should know from all my years in the city, and I can’t tell north from south, east from west. It’s like one of those childhood games, where you get blindfolded and spun around and around. The game's over and I’ve taken the blindfold off, but I can’t stop my head from spinning.
What a beautiful and moving post. It must have been such a relief to get home safe after all of that. It's hard to be far away from home when something so momentous happens at home.
I was here in NYC, it was my birthday, my roommate worked in One WTC and we didn't hear from her for several hours..totally hysterical. I still remember it like it happened last week.
Posted by: teahouseblossom | September 19, 2008 at 02:27 AM