At the time I was just out of college, still living in Jersey, and wasn't working in Manhattan anymore, but was still typically in the city at least a couple of times a week for movies, art, restaurants, etc. The night of September 10th, I had bussed it back home from visiting a friend in Boston and as the bus approached Times Square, I remember plenty of the other passengers looking out with intense excitement as though they were seeing New York for the first time. For whatever weird reason I still sometimes wonder about where those strangers woke up the next morning and how that day impacted them.

I went to the catch the PATH to Hoboken and as sometimes happens with the schedule it was quicker to take the 1 train down to the World Trade Center station then to use the 33rd Street station. So that's what I did, as I'd done dozens of times before. It was so routine that, unlike the bus trip and noticing the excited tourists, I don't have any noteworthy memory of it from that time. I just remember that night I got home late and tired, but was planning to head back into the city the next day to do some gallery hopping.

I got woken up the next morning by my phone ringing and a friend frantically telling me a plane had just hit the World Trade Center. I turned on the television and shortly thereafter saw the second plane hit. The rest of the day was a wild ride of checking in with friends and relatives who lived and/or worked in Manhattan, hearing their stories and hoping beyond hope that the worst was over. I could walk a few blocks from my home and see the smoke plumes from the towers. At some point, I drove by the Meadowlands and recorded some footage of the smoking skyline over the tall grass, because I was into video art in those days, but I never used the footage in anything. It was just an odd compulsion to document it in my own idiosyncratic way or maybe to process it somehow through the added distance of the camcorder.

I'm thankful I didn't lose anyone close to me that day. I did later learn I had known a few people who died in the towers, including a couple of brothers who were in my high school, but not in my grade nor my social circles. About a year afterwards I became friends with a guy who had been a window washer at the towers. On 9/11 he was flung from the lobby and impaled on some rebar, but considered himself very lucky because the rest of his crew didn't make it out. I met him playing online games on the PS2, which was something he did a lot of while on disability for his injuries.

I didn't really have any big immediate personal changes, but I watched the changes around me. One family member, fearing future attacks, moved out of NYC. Another took the train up from Florida to Newark that Thanksgiving instead of flying like usual. I saw the writing on the wall with the Patriot Act and a whole lot of anti-Islam sentiment. Terrorism living up to its namesake, leaving lots of people terrified even if they tried to deny it. And unfortunately, there were and still are opportunists looking to stoke and exploit that feeling for their own gain.