and some of us are very hungry now

by mg at 03:01 AM on September 11, 2002

On September 11th, 2001, I was in the middle of my unemployment. I’d left my last job in June, was scrounging freelance work as much as I could, but more often than not, I had nothing to do all day. So, it was quite surprising that I was awake at 8:46 A.M. considering I had absolutely no reason to be awake, with nowhere to be and no plans for the day. Maybe I’d had trouble sleeping.

I really don’t remember. The fact is I was awake.

I was listening to Howard Stern on the radio, making myself breakfast. They were talking about something ridiculous, as they usually do. Somewhat abruptly, Howard stopped what he was talking about, saying a plane had just crashed into one of the Twin Towers. I remember he didn’t believe it, and that he’d be really mad if someone was bullshitting him.

For some reason, I did believe, I’d already been moving from the kitchen into the living room to turn on the TV when Howard announced it was true. I hit the power button on the TV. The power button had broken years before, so I had to stick my finger into a little hole on the front of the TV and manually flip a switch.

The screen lit up. Pikachu was dancing. For a moment, I thought this was all some horrible joke. I started flipping channels. The North Tower on fire. The North Tower on fire. The North Tower on fire. It’s real.

The radio is still on, Howard talking. The reporter on the screen was talking. Images were flashing on the screen. There was so much information coming at me, yet none if it made any sense. How could this be real?

As the initial shock began to wear off, I either heard, or thought, its hard to keep it all clear, that it was probably just some pilot error, bad weather, instrument failure. Maybe I just wanted to believe that. And I began to.

I’d lived through the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. My high school was only two blocks away. The ’93 bomb shook our windows, knocked pencils off desks. But the buildings survived. I knew they’d survive this too.

I muted the TV, watched the images, and read the scrolling ticker, while keeping Howard on in the background. I’d grown up listening to Stern, every morning since I was 12. I wanted to be amongst friends, and that was as close as I could get.

I was staring intently at the screen when, what we’d all learn a couple moments later, a second plane crashed into the South Tower. All I could see was a great bloom of fire sprout from that buildings otherwise featureless surface. Suddenly, it became apparent that this was not an accident.

I sat for most of the rest of the day watching television, listening to radio, and surfing the internet, trying to suck in as much information as possible in a period when no one had any. It was all speculations and images with no meanings.

A little more than an hour after the first plane hit, the South Tower fell. A half an hour after that, the North Tower fell. There is no way I can possibly hope to explain what I felt as I watched the first, and then the second tower fall. There were no words then, and there are no words still today. Human language just does not have the vocabulary. Anything I tried to write here would pale to what was going on in my head; would be limper and more impotent than a pre-Viagra, pre-Britney Spears Pepsi commercial Bob Dole.

So, I wont try to explain. Besides, I don’t have to. You all felt the same way I did.

I went to church that Sunday because I wanted to, the first time that has ever happened in my adult life. I lit candles. Memorized “missing” posters, in the off chance I could help find someone. But, for the most part, I spent the next month in front of a TV, watching the same images, over and over. Plane. Building. Fire. Death.

This story has all the makings of a Hollywood blockbuster and it is so easy to forget, in the light of the sheer immensity of this moment in history, that this is really a story about individuals. A story about thousands of real people. This is a story of heroes, of survivors, of the departed.

Amongst all those stories, mine isn’t particularly exciting, but it is my story.

What is your story?