September 11, 2001

I'm going to go off subject today in honor of all the lives lost and forever changed on September 11, 2001.

I was not planning on posting anything but in the spirit of never forgetting, I must always remember. 

I was 31 years old and working on the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange. After the first plane hit, a headline ran across our news ticker that read "plane crashes into building, 5 people jump". It never occurred to me in that moment that that could be happening a mere 4 blocks away. I remember thinking "wow, that must be in Chicago and the pilot must have been drunk or had a heart attack". A very panicked co-worker alerted me to the situation-"don't you even know what is going on right now? A plane just hit the trade center". The second plane hit with such force, it shook our building. That's when I realized something was terribly wrong and this was no accident. 

September 11th will be a day that stands out forever in our history as Americans and our history as New Yorkers. It's the kind of day where you remember the most minute of details such as what you ate for breakfast (eggwhites and whole wheat toast), the weather (perfect) and what you wore (heels- I have always said pretty jokingly, that if you were going to wear heels, you had better be able to run in them. Never did I think I would ever have to put that to the test.) One of my memories of 9/11, didn't even happen on 9/11. It happened the night before as I waited out a heavy rainstorm while standing in a doorway in Soho. Life was pretty good then and I was taking in the moment. I remember smelling the rainy air completely oblivious to the surreal horror we were all about to experience the very next day. I remember that innocent (naive?) feeling. 

September 11, 2001 will forever for me, be holding onto my mother and yelling at her to not turn around, to just look forward as we ran from one of the tallest buildings in the world crumbling right before us. A building that was part of my landscape my whole life, a building that I had worked in as a young woman and still utilized on a daily basis. It was a vision my brain could not process and for a split second, entertained the possibility that this was not really happening. That it was somehow fake. 

We arrived home safe that night. There are thousands of others that did not. There are thousands who were having a normal morning, attending their usual morning meetings or boarding a plane, who never got to go home. 

I remember every single day. 

I will never forget the innocent people in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania who paid with their lives, I will never forget the families who were left behind and still suffer every single day, I will never forget the first responders who rushed in but never came out, I will never forget the volunteers who came from all over the country to try to help in whatever way they could, I will never forget that plume of smoke that seemed to linger forever or the smell of lower Manhattan over the following weeks, I will never forget the ash and semi burnt paper that was floating through the air, personal documents, divorce papers, literally up in smoke floating around lower Manhattan. I will never forget the sadness and the silence that took over, I will never forget the New Yorkers who banded together to help each other, literally stopping to pick each other up while running from a falling skyscraper.

 I will never forget that safe, innocent feeling that I felt during that rainstorm on Sept 10th.