This unaltered story [1] was originally published on OpenDemocracy.org.
License [2]: Creative Commons 4.0 - Attributions/No Derivities/Int'l.
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9/11: It’s all I’ve ever known
By: []
Date: 2021-09
I was six years old on September 11, 2001. It was a gorgeous day – there was not a cloud in the deep blue sky. At 8am my father dropped me and my sister off at our school in the East Village.
At about 9am my first-grade class abruptly stopped when the principal walked in. She gathered us in the communal area, raised her arms in the air and demonstrated with alternating fingers that airplanes had just hit two really tall buildings close to the school. Class would be ending early that day and our parents were coming to pick us up.
After a few hours my mother arrived. The three of us walked downtown. I remember standing on Delancey Street and watching droves of people walking in unison across the Williamsburg Bridge towards Brooklyn. There were no cars. No one was talking or running. It was surreal.
We walked south towards our apartment, located on the edge of Chinatown. We turned on the analogue TV but it didn’t work because the main antenna was located on top of one of the Towers.
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My mother told us that we were going to walk to the site of the buildings to see what was going on. We lived less than a mile away from the Towers. She said it was OK because the dark cloud of smoke was not coming our way – it was going to Brooklyn.
It seemed as if we were the only ones walking south. Everyone else was walking towards us covered in white ash. I remember seeing really old churches with the doors wide open telling people to come inside. We eventually came to an impasse as a police officer told us we couldn’t walk any further. So we returned home.
The next day, on September 12, my mother told us that we were going with her to St Vincent's Hospital in the West Village to donate blood for the survivors. We passed a large firehouse with dozens of people gathered outside, staring at fire trucks covered with debris, and inscribed with sentiments such as: “Thank you”, “We love you”, and “To all the brave men”.
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