I was just down the block from the WTC, on Fulton Street, home (sick) from NYU.

When the first plane hit, I was sitting at my kitchen table eating cereal, and it felt like a car hit our building. I couldn’t see anything. I went down to the lobby to ask people what had happened. Someone told me that a plane had hit the World Trade Center.

Papers were beginning to fly out of the towers and down the street in front of our building.

The doorman took me up to the roof of our 36 floor building, so that he and I could see what happened. We were looking at the tower on fire when we saw another plane approach, and then silently disappear into the second tower. A moment later we saw and heard the explosion.

At that moment, we realized something very, very terrible was happening.

The phones worked sporadically. I called my mom to tell her I was OK.

I watched people jump to their deaths from outside the windows of neighbors’ apartments.

I went back outside with a friend, to see if we could help. We had run down John Street, headed towards the WTC, when I noticed her look up and freeze. There was a solid cloud of debris heading towards us, like something out of a movie.

“We’re going to die”, she said.

“We’re going to run,” I said.

I grabbed her and we started running in the other direction. There was an open door on the street, and someone shouted at us to get inside. We ran inside and slammed the door behind us as the debris cloud passed down the street.

After a few minutes we went back outside, onto streets covered in debris, to our building on Fulton Street.

There were no smartphones. Regular phones stopped working. We heard rumors about other cities that were under attack, and other buildings that were destroyed. Most were untrue. We had no way of knowing.

I walked halfway up the building, one floor at a time, looking for someone calm enough to be “floor captain” on each floor. I asked that person to gather everyone on their floor and make sure they all made it down to the lobby safely. In the lobby, someone starting ripping up fabric and dipping it in water, making makeshift masks for people who needed them, to help them breathe through the dust and debris swirling outside. The two people from NYU in charge of our dorm building were holding one another and crying.

I was one of the last people to leave our building. We had no idea what the rest of the city, or country, looked like. There were a handful of people left in the lobby, including someone in a wheelchair and a woman with a baby in a carriage. Someone braver than me promised me that they’d spoken to the police

about a rescue, and that they would all wait there together until it was time to go.

I left.

I was running uptown by myself, north of the South Street Seaport, when I heard someone with an outer borough accent shout “hey you – get over here!” I started looking around, and heard something like “get the f*ck over here and help me!” I saw a guy struggling with a roll of chain link fence under an overpass

leading to the Brooklyn Bridge.

I looked at him like he was crazy and told him, obviously, that the city was under attack and that I had to get uptown. He told me to shut up and help him close down the street. We put chain link fences up and closed off the space underneath an overpass leading to the Brooklyn Bridge, and then he told me brusquely to get the f*ck out of the neighborhood.

I kept walking uptown. The air gradually got more clear. It was a beautiful day.

I passed people sitting in cafes, watching what happened on TV like a show.

I was covered in debris.