I remember:
- The text message saying “stay inside, more are coming”
- The view down Broadway, smoke and unreal like a movie
- Phone calls that didn’t connect, then phones that didn’t connect
- Managing to email my family, somehow
- Seeing the second tower collapse, two miles away and simultaneously touchable and unreal
- The cordon at 14th Street; National Guard, maybe?
- Fighter jets overhead, feeling safe
- Omar going home, not feeling safe
- The news, always on
- The parking lot below 14th Street, the emergency vehicles seeming abandoned there
- Later, the dust
- Turning off the news, trying to remember how to be normal
- A housemate, her job relocated to Jersey City, offering to paint my nails
- A period of feeling everything, followed by a period where I’m not sure I felt anything at all
And, years later, working out of 195 Broadway, the new buildings and memorial just being part of the New York landscape.