The 11th day of September

There's nothing different about today, on the surface. Once again, I had to stay late at work, making tonight's dinner the second one I've eaten at the office in a row. I left at 9:30 PM and walked past bars filled with people for whom Tuesday night is as good a night as any for a Brooklyn Lager and a hook-up. Outside the neighborhood supermarket, a man hauled black garbage bags to the sidewalk in a cart, the same type of cart they let customers use inside. At the corner of Lafayette and Prince Streets, a New York Fire Department truck sped by; an ugly Dalmatian hung its head out one of the windows, spotted ears flapping in the wind.

The wind is not pleasant tonight -- it is a sickly breeze that chills in a damp sort of way. It rained all day today, and the air smells of wet leaves. In fact, today's weather is the complete opposite of what it was like on Tuesday, September 11, 2001. On that day, exactly six years ago, the weather had been brilliant. It was the kind of day that made you wish you were outside doing things that made you sweaty and thirsty and eager for a lemon sorbet, instead of stuck in a college classroom somewhere in New Jersey, trying to make sense of synaesthetic approaches in art-making, as had been the case for me.

On that day, a little before 9:00 AM, a student burst into the classroom and announced to the class (before our professor's permission was granted) that a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center in New York.

The professor (with whom I had a loathe-hate relationship, and whose classes I failed, twice) said in a drone, "I'm going to wait for confirmation on this news before jumping to any conclusions."

I ignored him and left the classroom, out of curiosity, but also out of concern for my stock trader roommate, who had taken the train into New York City that morning, just like he did every morning, and would have arrived at the World Trade Center at around the time the plane hit. I tried calling his cellphone and couldn't get connected. And then I tried calling Sarah, my friend who worked in midtown Manhattan, the girl I had a crush on, the girl who in less than a month would become my girlfriend, the girlfriend I would marry in 2004. "We're sorry, all circuits are busy. Please try again."

So I went to the coffee shop around the corner, sat in front of the TV with a dozen strangers, and watched the world end on CNN.

Afterward, I went home and waited. New York was over 40 miles away, but that was close enough for the university to cancel classes for the remainder of the day, and the following day as well. I tried looking out the window to see if the smoke from lower Manhattan was visible from where I was (it wasn't). I finally got in touch with Sarah, who told me that she was safe, that there were no vehicles of any kind leaving the city, and that she would be staying at her boss's apartment uptown. I got a phone call from a college buddy, who was living just below the Empire State Building in midtown. He was afraid. He worried that a plane would crash into his building too, but he couldn't leave because the train and bus stations were flooded with people, some still covered in dust.

My roommate finally came home later that night, stone-faced and quiet. He had been riding the escalator up from the PATH train station to the base of the World Trade Center that morning when an explosion shook the foundations of the building. He, like everyone else, had thought that it was a bomb. Then he went outside, into the square between the two towers. The second plane hit a few minutes later, a concussive blast so loud that my roommate, who was also the drummer in our band, fell to his knees. When it started raining people, he wept with the five hundred strangers around him. And when it started raining computers and file cabinets and concrete, he ran.

By some miracle, he'd worn his tennis shoes that day.

That day was six years ago. Today, the city of New York remembered the people who died on September 11, 2001. There were ceremonies held, and speeches given, and flags flown, and prayers said, and beams of light turned on, and though I didn't participate in any of these things (for to me, there was nothing different about today, on the surface), I remember as well.