I wasn’t supposed to be in New York that morning.
I was living in Jersey City, across the river. But my last day of work had been the previous Friday, and I was taking a two-week break before starting my new job. At one point I was thinking of flying to Europe during the week of September 10, or maybe to San Francisco. Instead I decided to stay local.
The days leading up to it are encased in amber in my memory.
On Friday night, September 7, I had a falling out at the Phoenix with a guy I’d been dating for a month, because he started making moves on a friend of a friend.
On Saturday night, September 8, I had what I still consider, to this day, to be my quintessential Manhattan experience. I impulsively shaved off the goatee I’d had all summer and decided to go back into the city, back to the Phoenix, to replace bad memories with good ones. I struck up a conversation with a stranger, who wound up becoming a good friend. At four in the morning, instead of taking the PATH back home, I decided to pull a Holden Caulfield and go for a long, solitary walk through the streets of Manhattan. I wound up walking all the way up to the Upper East Side, more than 90 blocks. Along the way, I saw a plastic bag floating in the air, just like in American Beauty; I peed in the ornate men’s room in the magnificent lobby of the Waldorf-Astoria; I sat on the deserted steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art at the break of dawn and suddenly, surreally, saw hundreds of bicyclists ride by; and, for the first and still the only time in my life, I got cruised and picked up by a guy on the sidewalk. After we walked together for five blocks, he said he was too fucked up to do anything, so we parted ways.
I finally got home at 8 a.m., Sunday morning, September 9, exhausted and in love with Manhattan.
On Monday, September 10, I decided to visit Brooklyn Heights. I took the PATH to the World Trade Center concourse, bought a banana, browsed at the WTC branch of Borders, and then took the subway to Brooklyn. In Brooklyn Heights, I came across Plymouth Church, where presidential candidate Abraham Lincoln spoke out against slavery in February 1860. I’m pretty sure I also walked along the Brooklyn promenade and admired the skyline of lower Manhattan. On the way home, I stopped at the Gap in the WTC concourse and bought a t-shirt. Then I went home.
In the normal course of events I would have gone to bed that night and woken up the next morning at home in my apartment in Jersey City. I used to turn my phone’s ringer off when I slept, so I wouldn’t have woken up when my mom called me the next morning sometime after 9:00. Would I have turned the ringer back on and checked for messages? Or would I have heard people in the street, and would I have gone downstairs to Christopher Columbus Drive and stared at the burning towers directly across the river? My street ran east toward the Hudson River, directly toward the World Trade Center, and from the street there was always such a beautiful view of the twin towers: morning, sunset, or night, they always looked stunning, and sometimes I’d think of my friend Doug Ketcham from college who worked there — I was pretty sure he worked somewhere around the 100th floor — and I’d feel bad that we never got together socially.
But the normal course of events didn’t happen. I went online, and I met a guy, and I went back into Manhattan, and I spent the night at his place on West 10th Street, just off Sixth Avenue, near the Jefferson Market Library. The next morning his A/C was on, and it drowned out most outside noise; when I heard screaming from the street, I thought it must have been a rally for one of New York City’s mayoral candidates, since it was primary day.
I left his place at about 10:45 in the morning to walk to the 9th Street PATH station and go home. But something seemed weird. There was no traffic moving up Sixth Avenue. I walked to the intersection, and clumps of people were staring south. I looked south and I saw an enormous wall of gray smoke. I assumed a building was on fire. I asked a woman what had happened, and she told me that the World Trade Center had been blown up. (She said it had been done by the Palestinians.)
To this day, I still don’t really know how my brain processed that information. Unlike most people I know, I didn’t experience the events of that morning as a series of unfolding horrors: first plane hits (accident!), second plane hits (no, terrorism!), Pentagon gets hit, first tower falls, second tower falls. Since that morning, I’ve watched the news coverage numerous times, to the point where I sometimes think that I experienced it that way. But I didn’t. For me, it happened all at once. I thought it was a perfectly ordinary day, and then I learned that Hell had occurred.
My parents have sometimes joked with me that I’m oblivious. I was never as oblivious as I was that morning.
As for the rest of the day, I wrote about that ten years ago.
Ten years pass much more quickly than they used to.
I remember talking with my best friend in 1996 on the tenth anniversary of the Challenger explosion. The space shuttle had blown up on his 12th birthday, and we used to joke about what a crappy birthday it turned out to be for him. Ten years later, we were both 22. We couldn’t believe ten years had gone by; it made us feel old. In the previous ten years, I’d moved to Japan, come back to the U.S., gone through four years of college, graduated, and become a working adult. So much had happened in his life, too. We had literally grown up in that time.
It doesn’t feel like ten years have passed since 9/11. Yes, I was just 27 then; I didn’t know Matt; my brother had not yet met his wife; my niece was not even a twinkle in someone’s eye. Nobody had heard of Barack Obama; the iPod had not yet been announced; there was no iPhone, no Facebook, no YouTube; the first “Lord of the Rings” movie had not yet come out.
So much has happened. So why doesn’t it feel like any time has passed? Maybe it’s because we still live in the world that 9/11 created. The Challenger explosion was a single event with few national repercussions besides a temporary setback for the U.S. space program. But 9/11 is with us every day, and the weird thing is, we don’t even realize it. The idea of men standing outside Penn Station wearing fatigues and carrying guns used to seem like something out of a movie, but when it happens today I don’t bat an eye. I don’t even blink when someone at a Broadway theater asks me to open my bag. It doesn’t seem like New York has changed in ten years, but we forget the little ways in which it has changed. It’s comforting how easily human beings adapt, but it’s also unsettling.
My therapist’s office is on West 10th Street, off Sixth Avenue. Once a week I cross Sixth Avenue near Jefferson Market Library and walk through the intersection where I first looked south and learned what had happened. Each year, when I go to therapy on the day closest to September 11, I walk through that intersection and get an eerie feeling.
I remember, back then, thinking that one day it would be ten years since 9/11. I hoped we’d still be around, but I honestly wasn’t sure we would be. I wondered who would be president in 2011. I wondered what the world would be like, someday in the future, when we could look back and think of 9/11 as some distant event.
I’m still wondering when that will happen.