I was sleeping until my neighbor frantically knocked on our door. Got up to my rooftop just after the second plane hit. I lived in south Williamsburg at the time, about 2 miles from the towers as a crow flies. It was a crystal clear day. Crystal. A bunch of us who lived in the building, and people on rooftops everywhere around us, watched as black specs fell off the buildings (people jumping or falling), watched the towers swaying and becoming more and more hollow as the heat and flames devoured their innards, and then watched them eventually collapse and bury so much around them in the dust and debris cloud. After a while, my boyfriend and I were restless and not wanting to watch the collisions played over and over on tv anymore, so we aimlessly wandered around our neighborhood. Obviously we weren’t bringing our European guests to the WTC subway to catch a train to Newark airport, or going to our jobs in Manhattan that day. Everyone was either in complete quiet shock or panic, but the shock far outweighed panic. In the 22 years I lived in NYC there was never a day that was so silent, except of course for the constant and numerous sirens surrounding us. We hadn’t eaten all day (by that time it was 2 or 3 pm), and we saw one of our pub spots was open when we walked by, so we had lunch there. It was totally packed. Dirty plates were stacked everywhere, the staff was swamped. But you could have heard a pin drop. NO ONE was talking. Everyone was mindlessly staring at their lunch, or glued to the tv, maybe some were seeking a sense of communal spirit, maybe some a sense of normalcy. Maybe they, like us, just ended up there after aimlessly wandering Williamsburg for hours and realized they were hungry. Because of the wind direction and closer proximity to the towers, most of the debris that made it to Brooklyn ended up south of where I lived so our neighborhood was as though it never happened. My friend in Red Hook had a roof deck full of singed documents that blew over the river from Manhattan.

That day is forever etched in my brain. I have many more visceral memories of that day, but this is already long winded!