Unexpected Destinations

A remembrance of September 11th, 2001. Twenty years on.

If time could both stop and a single moment be stretched on to infinity. This was that moment. This was no freak accident, this was war. We were under attack. America. New York City. Our city, my home.

There was a communal gasp, followed by an eerie silence that fell across our office. 9:03am. The world as we once knew it, was forever changed. This was our MLK, our JFK moment; our 9/11.

Half an hour earlier I had been rushing out the door of my fourth floor walk up in Astoria to get to work on time. I was chronically late and my Swiss boss was forever getting on me about it.

“Work starts at 9am Ameena, not 9:02 or 9:05.” Stroking his beard with one hand, pointing to the oversized Mondrain clock on the wall with the other.

That day I was surprisingly on time as I dodged the morning traffic to cross Northern Boulevard to our open plan office overlooking the rail yards in Long Island City.

“The Tower’s been hit.” I heard a voice scream behind me. I turned to see see my coworker Burt running towards me.

“What?” I yelled back.

“One of the Twin Towers been hit by a plane.” He yelled, out of breath from running, in his thick Staten Island accent.

I followed his lead and ran up the stairs behind him to the second story loft. We rushed to join the others already at the west facing windows that looked out onto the Manhattan skyline.

The North Tower had been hit by a plane someone reiterated and was billowing black plumes of smoke. Explanations, the way the human mind searches to connect the dots, were running through my head. Freak Accident, pilot mishap, lone wolf gone mad.

Minutes later, as the cities eyes were glued to the smoking North Tower, we witnessed the South Tower get hit by a plane and immediately go up in a cloud of bright yellow flames.

Jet Fuel. War. This was War. New York City was under attack.

I was in my early twenties, in the city without family except for my spouse. Who that morning had left a few moments before me to catch the E train to his job as a recording engineer in a Chelsea studio.

We’d been in the city just over a year and a half, newlyweds starting out our adult lives. The City had been hardening me everyday since I moved there but nothing could have prepared me for this day.

I had never known that level of helplessness. The empty rock that sits and remains in one’s chest and gut. As the news poured in about the other flights, the Pentagon attack, I sunk deeper into a place I’d never been before. Despair. Terror. That’s exactly what the terrorists wanted. To install fear in our everyday lives. To disrupt our beings.

I sat alone in our apartment that evening with our two cats. Listening to the news on the radio, nervously pacing and waiting. I wouldn’t hear from my spouse until late that evening when he was finally able to leave the city and walk home with thousands of others across the Queensboro Bridge.

I can still remember the toxic smell that lingered in the air weeks after the attack. Burning buildings, plastic, metal and human flesh. The images of people jumping from the upper story windows of the burning Towers, people crushed under rubble and debris will forever haunt me.

But like a phoenix rising from the ashes of the lives lost, my body took its own course correction. Some nine months later we would bring a new life into the city of destruction and tragic loss.

Our daughter was conceived in the days following the chaos and terror, in a longing for some kind of connection and love.

She is now 19 years old and attending college abroad. Her father and I are long divorced. We left each other and then the city many years ago now.

Unexpected destinations. (Excerpt from a longer piece)