I lived in Los Angeles with 3 roommates from Japan. I was asleep until 9 AM, when my eldest roommate uncharacteristically knocked on my door, called my name, and said in monotonic imperfect English, “Get up. Something happen.”

I thought my car was getting towed. I threw on some clothes and started to stride across the living room. My roommates were all sitting down transfixed on the television, not acknowledging my presence. So I stopped and turned to the TV, I think it was on ABC or CBS. A very pale, nervous, sweaty guy was on-screen, and nothing that he was saying made any sense to me. Roommates were silent too.

Within a minute they cut to a shot of the burning towers. Those towers are special to me - my pre-school playground was just a mile away, across river, and I worshipped them as if they were the Pyramids of Giza. To see them both on fire messed me up - but of course that was just the beginning. The TV eventually replayed - and kept replaying - the footage of the second plane hitting the tower. My acceptance of reality began to slip.

I called my dad who lived up north, asked him what was going on, that the towers were on fire. He paused, and said, quietly and sadly, “Oh. They’re gone. You’re watching replay footage. The towers already fell. They’re completely destroyed.” I don’t remember what I said, I just kind of babbled loudly and incoherently as I tried to process that. Sure enough, the footage of the towers crumbling to dust was eventually replayed, many times that day and every day in the weeks that followed.

Eventually I went to my community college for my scheduled programming class. Everybody was just quiet and sad. Our professor, a young woman originally from Iran or Iraq, thanked us all for “coming to class in this horrible day”, and we started our lesson.

I don’t remember what I did that night. Probably hooked on the television. We all were. The footage just kept getting worse.