Wake up.
Drink water.
Brush teeth.
Eat breakfast.
Leave house.
Go to work.
See friends.
Make plans.
Come home.
Hang out.
Go to sleep.
Today is a regular day… except that today is the day before September 11.
I’ve written about September 11. I’ve talked about it, been choked up about it, thought about it, cried about it, accepted it and never forgotten it.
I lived it and It lives with me.
And though I’ve though about 9/11 a lot, September 10 is a different story. It was the last day that I could ever again—in my life—think that the worst couldn’t happen to me. Because it can. The worst can happen to anyone. At anytime.
There was never a month better than September. In fact, when I was pregnant with Rafaella, I had secretly hoped that she would come a week early so that she would be born in September. Even though my grandmother hammered that everyone in our family got married in July, I wanted to get married in September. I have always adored September; the cool weather, the flavors of cinnamon and pumpkin, the colors that turned from a summer bold to autumn warm. There was no better season than Autumn in New York City—except maybe Christmas in New York City.
I tell you this not so that you understand my love for September but so that you understand my love for this time in this place and my innocent, naive mindset on September 10, 2011.
I had just started my last year of college. I had spent the week moving into the best city in the world, into a new apartment with best friends. The most important year of my life, to date, was ahead of me. In fact, tomorrow – Tuesday, the 11th – would complete my first week of classes. But how could I have known, on a regular Monday, that completing my first full week of my senior year, would not happen?
Looking back, it was a scene where the camera follows a doe-eyed Senior. She’s unsuspecting—as are kids of that age before anything real happens to them. She’s an actress walking down the familiar streets she has known so intimately. In the scene, a familiar kind of music plays. The audience knows something is about to happen but the actress—poor thing—has no idea that life, as she knows it, will never be the same. There is no warning. No dark alley or loud noise. No premonition. Life has always been flawless so she doesn’t know to be careful. The sky is blue, the day has been good to her and just like any regular day.
The night of the 10th, I went to my friend’s apartment. She was the Resident Assistant (RA) of one of the dorms on West Street. She was on duty that night. So I went to her apartment to have some wine and catch up after a summer away. It got late and she asked me to stay over and I don’t know why I didn’t because normally, I’d have said yes. But it was September. I had class the next day and the night was beautiful. “I’ll walk home,” I told her. And I walked home. A seemingly more dangerous decision up til that point in my life. I slept soundly in my bed on William Street until the next morning when I’d wake up to sirens and screams.
The next morning, the windows at that West Street apartment, the window I sat by to drink my wine and smoke a cigarette, were blown in from the explosion of the first tower. My best friend, as I’d come to know, was taking a shower in that same area, only to walk out of the bathroom into a smoke-filled living room, windowns blasted in, apartment buildings that would in a week’s time be leveled. The floor covered in glass and sadness.
That was the beginnig of waht I’d know as September 11.
September 10th was still a regular day not a steel dragon crashing into the side of a building. Not the day that I’d start waiting fo the shoe to drop. On September 10th, smoke was still what filled Ryan’s Irish Pub every Thursday night instead of what turned a perfectly blue sky into a dark haze. Smoke was still what wafted out of an RA’s apartment; not what turned day into night within moments of a tower falling to its grave. On September 10th, LIFE, as I knew it, was normal.
September 10 for many years of my life was a regular day.
Wake up.
Drink water.
Brush teeth.
Eat breakfast.
Leave house.
Go to work.
See friends.
Make plans.
Come home.
Hang out.
Go to sleep.
Everything was the same except for, of course, that it became the day before September 11.
