The Towers Fell

In just sixteen minutes by local bajan time it will be 9/11.

I was in my favorite coffee shop ordering coffee with a double shot of espresso, my day off when suddenly there was a metal smashing sound and we all turned toward the door, ran to help, sure there had been a car crash on the corner ten feet away.

It was so loud, a creaking clashing screech of buckled metal, a boom that echoed deep within the bones and hollows of the head. We looked left, looked right but there was nothing there. Another gas tank blowing up in Jersey? That was all the experience we had of big noise without a visible cause.

I grabbed my coffee, taking it to go, and headed two doors down then up the stairs to home where my telephone was ringing. When I picked up and said hello I heard screams and layered voices, no one talking to me, some freak of jumbled lines had hooked me to an eerie mix of phone calls each one talking fast and scared with sobs and screams and crashes in the background then the phone went dead.

I crossed the room and turned on the television, that eye that links us to the world so quickly and suddenly my foot felt the sear of the flames I was watching pouring from the tower as my coffee, freshly made and steaming, fell from fingers reaching to the screen to push back the silver flicker that touched and pierced and billowed smoke from tower number two and then my ears convulsed as sound caught up with light and broke the world again.

I stood and stared unmoving, barely blinking, each breath a conscious thought to fill my lungs. One could be an accident, but two? Standing in my living room I ducked, as fighter planes screamed low above my head. News anchors talked, knowing little and then the towers fell. I did not think, I ran. Ran along Court Street almost down to DUMBO, the only place I knew as a place to give blood and I was not the first one there.

Eventually the line curved around three blocks or more, so many people hoping that people were just injured, that there was something we could do. Other lines curved over the Manhattan Bridge, hurrying, hurrying, carrying blankets, water and first aid kits. People at their best, trying to help.

I gave blood and called the nurse as the young man on the pallet next to me turned green while at the door someone argued that his blood was clean and it was discrimination to refuse to bleed him because he was gay. People at their worst, not understanding that we all were in shock and injured. The world had been wounded in some unhealing way and could never move back to where it had been that morning.


In memory of so many, especially the Fab Five who never got to move into their apartment.