9/11/2001

The morning of 9/11/2001, I was living in Brooklyn Heights and was having a "phone session" with my therapist when a friend called me to tell me that a plane had just flown into the World Trade Center. My doctor worked on the Upper East Side and more and more often I didn't feel like taking the train up there for what was becoming more of a lecture series than something helpful. I told my doctor what I had just learned, and he said that he wasn't surprised and that he had been expecting someone to blow up a boat in the harbor for years. I turned on the TV and after about a minute I told him I had to go, he asked "why?" I stopped seeing him shortly after. This was early before the second plane hit and before the reports of the other planes started hitting the airwaves. Watching it on television had a bit of a surreal distancing effect, there was a traffic helicopter taking the footage and in at that moment it was being reported as it was happening.  There were a lot of sirens as our local fire companies raced over the bridge to respond. Then the second plane hit.  My friend and I were on the phone and watched the news. Sometime during that hour I decided I needed to get out of the house and I went down to the Promenade to see what was happening. When I got there people were milling around, some had binoculars, we watched the smoke, there was a lot of pacing. Then the first tower collapsed. Then the second. Then there was a void in the skyline. Later I saw thousands of smoke and dirt covered people walk over the bridge. I passed out water. My girlfriend made it home from midtown via a long walk over the Williamsburg Bridge. The sky filled with smoke, burnt papers from Cantor Fitzgerald landed in my friend's backyard in the North Slope, the smell of the fire filled the air for months, I got a dry cough that lasted for a while, friends of friends died and some others had near escapes.