Why do we take such pains to commemorate these anniversary days - one year, five years, twenty-five years - as if they were especially different from any other day, just because they round off the units we tend to so neatly? What's the difference between five years, and four years and a bit?

It is twenty years, two hundred and fifty-nine days since the first time I went up to the top of the World Trade Center. That was the day after Christmas, 1985; it's pretty easy to remember since the trip, a gift from an aunt and uncle, was 'delivered' in the form of an inscription inside a NYC picture book.

I remember the strangeness of many first experiences that day, like taking the Long Island Rail Road in from Suffolk County. I realize now that it was my first real train trip anywhere, so it's little wonder that the stations, names and sights flashing by made some deep impression: Cold Spring Harbor (that town where I had seen actual Ferraris and Rolls Royces on the street, it fascinated me,) Syosset, Jamaica. The wind whipped down the canyons of Manhattan; though I grew up within a hundred miles of the city and saw it a hundred times from the Throg's Neck and GWB, it would be almost another ten years before I went there very much, and so for a long time after I associated the place with clear, biting cold. I remember the longest elevator ride I've ever taken (and ever will?) the floor-to-ceiling windows on the observation deck of the WTC and the vertigo they induced, my grandmother's town in New Jersey marked out on the glass (but I couldn't make that little burg out) and small planes flying over the river, below us.




It is five years and three days since I got tremendously drunk on a Saturday night at that beautiful, barely furnished apartment I shared with an old college friend on Boulevard East. Drunk on red wine along with M. and M., dear friends who are now split, dispersed and lost to me - one back to Poland, the other still in the city and enthusiastically enmeshed in some motivational cult the last I heard. Five years and two days since I woke up, hungover and not remembering what had happened to me, how I even ended up in my bed at the end of it all. Also five and two since Kiki and I had our first "fight" over the phone. Five years and one since we followed up with a desperate, drawn-out, hard evening conversation on that Monday night. I was sitting in that chair beside the window with the West Side view, trying to convince her not to give up on me, to keep her from "taking some time off" from us. What in the world possessed me - sometimes a fatalist, but never a clairvoyant - to say what I said to Kyra on the phone that night, in protest?

"None of us knows if we're going to be here tomorrow."

It is still incredibly weird to me that I said that, on that night, and I'm not certain anyone else would believe it if I told them. But it's true. September 10th.

Well over five years have now passed since I was regularly practicing with a local soccer club on the rooftop field at Pier 40, the towers lit up and beautiful just down the Hudson on those chilly spring evenings. And it is five years and a couple months since I would finish work in Newark, take the PATH into the WTC, and amble out to Battery Park City. There I would soak in the late summer, late afternoon riverside vibe; park-goers, sailboats, water-taxis plying back and forth, the haze over New Jersey. Eventually, invariably I'd fade into sleep for a while, the whir of the city all around me. A little later some fellow Metro fans would show, and we'd start a clumpy post-work game.

My father has told me about when he was working down around the city in the early 70's. The Towers weren't yet finished, but for some reason he and a colleague were inside one of the buildings, and decided to go for a little trip as far up as they could. When the elevator doors opened, they were on an unfinished floor, minus the windows and thus mighty breezy. They got out of there quick. I get dizzy just thinking about it.

Today it is five years and one day since I finally put a plan into motion - my half-baked plan to make a few bucks on the side teaching English, and in doing so, preserve my sanity. This, after all, was what I had come to NYC to do, what I did do for a little while; qualifications aside, I was always more apt in the classroom than the cubicle. With a stack of flyers fresh and hot off the printer and the idea of covering Washington Street, I went into that Hoboken evening on my mission. Now we know that this was the last night of an age. Let history note that it was oppressively hot, humid, with glowering black clouds rolling in; my flyers, my packing tape and I made it about halfway before the skies absolutely opened up.

Damning the expanse between bus stops, I sprinted to the dim end of Washington Street, and waffled on tacking one last flyer up inside the bus shelter, lest New Jersey Transit hunt me down for desecrating their property. I got home soaked to the skin, only to have that pleading, forlorn Monday night conversation, which I finally lost. And I never, ever got a call about English lessons.




It was outrageously beautiful out, five years ago this morning. I saw many glorious morning, afternoon, and night scenes, in the course of living a year and a half just a mile from the city, with that broad, all-encompassing Hudson view which I loved. But this one was remarkably so, so much that I really was dazzled by the bright, clear yellow band of sunlight on the river, despite being so late. I had woken up late and was rushing; the last regular bus to Hoboken went by at 9:15. A few minutes after nine I hurried down to the street, without breakfast, without having turned on the TV. At the bus stop a block up, a few people were pointing downtown, across the river. That's when I saw the tower smoking, and a reddish-blackish puff come out of the side.

Perhaps it's only this way in retrospect, but today, the most amazing, amusing, befuddling thing to me, is that I still tried to go to work. Of course, neither I nor anyone else there knew what the hell was going on; I thought a fire, perhaps a bomb (it is thirteen years, one hundred and ninety-seven days since I was home sick from school, and the show I was watching suddenly cut out when a bomb went off in the North Tower). It was, as everyone has said a million times, surreal. Someone at the bus stop said they had seen the plane hit. Not a little private plane, a jet. A moment later someone came along, and told us they just showed a second plane hit on television. And yet I got on the bus to Hoboken. That amazes me now.

It was a slow, increasingly anxious bus ride down to Hoboken; some kid had a radio and was relaying news: fire and smoke at the Pentagon, planes missing all over the place. When I went down into Hoboken PATH station, both towers were smoking horrendously, almost right above us. I got on a train to Newark - again, I don't know what I was doing - and sat there for a while. People who had been in the towers were getting on now: "They didn't evacuate us, so I evacuated myself." Girls who looked younger than me talked about seeing people jump. Shock.

When we came out from underground near Jersey City, there was nothing but that enormous gray cloud behind us. Someone said the towers had both collapsed. Others, including myself, refused to believe it. That was just the smoke, drifting around to obscure the view. They may be burning, but they couldn't actually go down.

In JC everything - the trains, the station - was in the process of shutting down, and so it was chaos. Thousands of people wandering the streets around Journal Square, without any idea where they were or how they would get home. Bits of dust and paper falling like snow. If I hadn't happened on a bus taking people on its way back to the depot, which lay a few towns up from mine, it would have been a much longer and more arduous day than it was.

I got home around noon, watched the news, finally got through to my family, and steadily ignored my flatmate's phone calling, knowing it had to be his family in Brazil. He worked for the stock exchange after all, splitting time between Brooklyn and Wall Street, and while I was relatively sure he was fine, I didn't want to say. His odyssey home wasn't untypical - he straggled in, having walked from the financial district to Brooklyn and back to the midtown ferries, sometime after nine that night. And he left that job, and the city, little more than a month later, even before I did.

Kiki was the first to call me that day, to make sure I was safe and sound.

And that is my 9/11 story, which I don't really think about too much anymore, outside of...yearly anniversaries like this. There's a bit more, but I've already written a ton, without saying anything terribly profound. While it's amazing to think that I was there, as I sit here in rural Ohio listening to people talk about that morning five years ago today, I find it harder and harder, more and more of a reach to put my own claim in; "I was there." I'm so far away in space and time now; in the end I was very lucky to not lose anyone directly, though a few friends of friends lost their lives in the attack. The feeling is less "witness to history" than "bystander to history." But maybe I diminish it a little. I don't know.

I left that job a couple months later, that place on New Year's Eve 2001. I've been back to the city plenty of times, but I've never been to see the hole in the ground, and I don't imagine I will before something new is in its place.

It's five years and six days since I last was in the WTC, doing the long WTC PATH-NYC subway transfer on my way from Newark to 137th Street for classes, and I remember every last bit of it.




Like Ryan Adams, I still love you, New York. But I'm hard put to say if I could ever go back there to live.