Thanks for sharing this with us. My thought when it happened at around midnight my time halfway across the world was ” It’s the end of the world”. It just struck fear at the very core.

Happy.

One of the greatest things we humans do is record history – we pass on our stories and memories from one generation to the next in many ways but at it’s core is basic storytelling and the truth is the most powerful story we can tell.

Everyone has a memory of that day – it’s one of the defining moments of our lives…whether we were in NYC or not (like Hannah I was there exactly the week before) we all can remember what we were doing at the moment we heard – or watched – what was happening in Manhattan. Events can often have a great impact on us and our memories of it can shape our lives, change our paths, and alter our futures.

Which is why you should definitely not carry any baggage about taking those pictures – as hard as they may be to look at we all need to look at them. Even the worst of our human moments must be documented and shared so that others can learn from them, otherwise atrocities go unnoticed and unchanged.

Bravo to you for helping us to remember. And, like Rhonda, I hope someday you find peace with your childhood memories.

I think the incredible need to understand and comprehend what is essentially impossible to understand is what drives me to read articles like yours and view documentaries as they are broadcast on TV, especially due to the recent anniversary. I try and keep a lid on it though, just knowing that I’ll never truely know all that there is to know about this catastrophe, and neither should I.

However, your report was a new grass-roots experience of that day and was great to read.

I have photos, taken on my (now old-fashioned…) apex panoramic camera of the towers exactly a week before 9/11 and I find it hard to look at them now. I was an Englishgirl in New York, my first trip and was loving it. I adored those buildings and was so looking forward to going right up to the top! And that’s were I was a week, to the hour, before they came down.

Atrer 9/11 I cried night after night on returning from my work in the city of London and watching the unstoppable media coverage for several days after the attacks. Remembering the lift operator and my ears popping as we acsended, remembering just how T-A-L-L they were and how people had fallen and jumped… ..all……that……way…. Crying as I recognised the previous beauty of the lobby now mangled, filthy and devastated.

They say that part of greiving is greiving for our own mortality, and I was. It could have been me; minus one week and an hour. So thankful that the towers did not open to the public until 9.30am (I’d been so keen, I’d arrived too early!!) and therefore relieved that I did not have to imagine a tourist literally falling with the roof. Regardless, its the human stories of the time and those, like yours, that still unfold that I consider now.

I was a 27 year old graduate working in an investment bank at the time and that afternoon in London we were heartlessly tannoyed to turn the TVs off on the tradefloor and get on with our work. It was then I decided to change. I left 10 days later to study for a degree in design and graduated 5 years ago. Life is too short.

Thanks, Hannah

Thank you for writing this, it’s important to write about it and remember. For some reason, my memories of 9/11 have been at the forefront of mind this year more than any previous anniversary.

I was in high school, a forty minute ride from midtown. My dad had been there the day before. Three or four kids in my school had parents that worked there, one died, one was missing for 2 days before he called home. All day at school the intercom kept calling kids to the office, moms couldn’t reach their husbands in the city and they wanted their family home… just in case. My mom waited for me at the bus stop and held my hand as we walked home. It was horrible. We could see the smoke from my neighborhood and we just cried together as a family.

this was exquisite.

THE.

SCRIPT.

PRONTO.

I was 12 in 2001, so my memories of the event are a little different. I was walking into my junior high when one of my friends came up to me.

“Did you hear the World Trade Center got attacked?”

I shrugged. For some reason, it didn’t surprise me, nor did it seem that important at first. In my twelve-year-old mind, I felt like there was always something with the words “World Trade” in its name being bombed, or rioted at, or shot.

“I saw it on TV. The building looks like a used matchstick…they say Osama Bin Laden did it.”

None of the teachers even tried to teach at first. They just left the TVs on and stared with the students. Finally, the administration decided we had seen enough. An announcement came on over the intercom. The teachers had been instructed to turn their TVs off and start their lessons. We would be pretending that nothing was happening.

After the speaker clicked off, then the teacher leaned forward on his stool and told us that he didn’t plan on doing that. He’d be leaving the TV on, and we’d be talking. This was likely to be the most important event of our lives, he said, and he didn’t plan on censoring it.

There are other memories that follow that one. The panics. Rich neighborhood kids talking about how their dads bought them all gas masks. Sitting in the parking lot of an apple orchard later that fall and hearing the words “Air Force” and “Afghanistan” come out of our car radio. Those came later.

This happened when I was 12. When I was 19, I finally visited the WTC crater for the first time. I can’t even imagine what it must have been like for you to be in Manhattan that day.

also, did you go into the bar? hope you found peace that night