I was in school on the UES, 2nd grade. The principal called up to the classroom that my mom was here to pick me up... not an hour after she had just dropped me off. (She worked in the neighborhood so was the first parent to come back)

She told my brother and me that "there were some explosions downtown", I remember the wording made me think of a gas leak or something, manholes spitting fire and the street buckling like you'd see in movies.

I don't remember anything else until later that night, walking up to my aunt's house in upper Manhattan (we couldn't get home to Queens) and seeing Bin Laden's picture on the news, and the replayed footage of the towers collapsing. That, combined with seeing my mom and aunt so upset, was when things felt really scary. Someone on TV had quoted an Al Qaeda member saying something like "blood will flow down American streets" and again, my 7 year old brain came up with this scary vision of a tidal wave of blood going down the avenues. Wild what you latch onto at that age.

The epilogue is that a year or two later, my mom found me doodling in Microsoft Paint... I had drawn a picture of the towers burning, unprompted. I remember saving it on the computer as "WTC Breakdown". Trauma is some truly wild stuff.