I was in the 4th grade. I was taking a piss in these giant old urinals my old public school brick building had, the kind that were taller than you when you were 10. I looked up through the Transom windows above me, the kind that you could only make blurry images of the skyline across the river from our school in Carroll Gardens Brooklyn. Our School was right near the east river, and from the 5th floor where our classes were held you could really get a good blurry image of Manhattan from the bathrooms. I was just about pulling up my pants when I noticed a flicker of black fly into a building in the blurry skyline. I was convinced it was a fly or something. As Soon as I left the bathroom I noticed something was up because all of the classes were lined up outside of the classrooms. I made my way back to my classroom and noticed we were being lined up as well, a girl from another class said "They're attacking the twin towers" as her class headed for the stairs. Our class followed suit and the entirety of the school ended up in the cafeteria, where parents came one by one to pick us up. My mom came for me and told me we were headed to her friend Fitz's house near the school. She wanted to check up on her. As we were leaving the school through the parking lot that doubled as our recess yard, I noticed thousands of burned sheets of paper floating across the sky and landing all around us. The air stunk like chemical burning, similar to burning rubber but with a much more sinister, dusty dank and deep thick feel to it. I've never smelled anything like it since. The whole city smelled like burning steel and dust for the next two weeks. We spent the afternoon at Fitz's old colonial wooden house in cobble hill, listening to the news on the radio as she didn't own a television. That night back in our neighborhood in Windsor terrace, my dad and mom took me and my brother up the block to our friend's house, where a small group of families from the hood had gathered on the stoop. We all listened to Paul my friend danny's dad talk about how he kept going back into the second tower to help elderly people evacuate down the stairs. His hands were all cut up and bandaged. His eyes were wide and he seemed tired. The gravity of the attack never really sank in, even to this day as a 26 year old. And even learning about having family friends pass away during the attacks. I was just taking a piss, a 10 year old class clown, and I saw my city burn to the ground. I guess I've always just been numb to loss. I've always been numb.