With the start of a new academic quarter I had already been reevaluating my daily schedule, and then my fabulous ex-flatmate posted this blog: How To: Not Go Stir-Crazy When You’re a Freelancer. There’s a lot of good advice in there that works for the full-time student, as well. So I’m restructuring my days to create more space for reading, and less time for obsessively checking social media. More time for walks, less time for picking over my Netflix queue and re-watching something. Getting my school work done on campus, and spending my time at home with my loved ones, or reading, or writing. Remembering to take my vitamins.

Well, time to see who I pissed off on Facebook, then it’s off to the halls of higher learning for me. Be good.

To be clear, I will never take pleasure or comfort in a person’s death. While I would like to think that the goal of the mission was to capture Osama bin Laden, I am not that naive. I would much rather have seen him captured alive, and put on trial, and then put in prison for the rest of his life, and I will never understand how the taking of a human life qualifies as the fulfillment of “justice.” I think we’re supposed to be evolving beyond the desire to kill one another. But while we are thinking apes, there’s a lot of us that’s still just ape. So it goes.

So, no, I’m not cheering but then I’m not exactly heartbroken, either. It is a strange amalgamation of both bringing back a lot of memories and some sort of catharsis on some level.  It’s not relief that he’s dead – that’s not it at all – but a relief that, on some level, it’s over. Ten years. Ten fucking years. And if that makes me a bad person, I’ll take it. While waiting for Obama to come on and speak, I had to excuse myself to the bathroom and did not come out again until I could stop shaking. Yeah, strong men also cry, Lebowski.

This is me in the summer of 2001 when I was 17 years old. Just a freakin’ baby.

And this is something I wrote about my 9/11 experience back in 2008, a little edited and updated. These are the things that I remember:

***

I was 17 years old, and had moved to New York City in June of 2001. My first summer in the city was truly magical: I lived with my boyfriend and our roommate, but I had enough savings that I didn’t have to work at first, so I spent my days exploring midtown, learning the subway, listening to music on my walkman while I navigated the streets, all while I savored my first real freedom in life. I remember that rush I felt when the N-line would go from above-ground in Astoria, then dip below the East River, taking me to Manhattan. I was in love, in the best city in the world, and everything was warm and beautiful and bright.

Eventually, I started working for a temp agency, and in September was doing some pretty brainless paper-pushing work for an office on Madison Avenue, somewhere in the 40′s. I was one block from my boy’s office and a few blocks from our roommate’s office in Times Square. This is why we were able to find each other so quickly afterwards.

September 11th, 2001 was so very warm. The sky was totally cloudless and this beautiful, bottomless blue, and to this day when I see a sky like that it makes me want to cry and there is just no way you can explain that to anyone and not sound like a crazy person. The somewhat comforting thing is that several of my New Yorker friends share this particular post-traumatic aversion to very blue skies on very warm fall days.

And on that day, I remember coming up to the office and seeing all my co-workers out on the street, looking south down Madison Avenue. I remember seeing the smoke from the first plane curling up from one of the towers and calling my boyfriend, whose office didn’t have windows, saying that he really needed to go out on the street and see it himself. My office didn’t have computers; it was just the five of us ladies, and a bunch of filing cabinets, typewriters, and a radio. We turned on the radio to listen to the news about what happened to the tower, and went about our morning.

We all figured that the plane that hit was a small plane; a private plane with a bad or a drunk pilot. We were shocked when the news came in over the radio that it was a commercial jet. I called my boyfriend: “Baby, they’re saying it was a jet! What the hell?! Can you imagine? The pilot must have been drunk.”

I remember disbelieving that a second plane had hit. We thought the radio had it confused. “We just heard that a second plane hit. Go downstairs and look down Madison. I don’t know what’s going on.”

Then the radio announced that one of the towers had fallen and all the ladies in our office rose as one and ran to the elevator. We looked south, but there was nothing to see but smoke. We went back inside and stared at the radio; we didn’t know what else to do.

Then, I made the last phone call: “Baby, they hit the Pentagon. We need to go.” There was a “they,” now, and “they” were trying to kill us. “Stay there,” he said, “I’m coming to get you.”

He came to my office, and we went down to the street, and then our roommate met up with us and I remember feeling so relieved that at least the three of us were together. They bickered about what to do and where we should start walking and I looked at the Empire State Building – now the tallest building on the island and the most visible target – just ten blocks away and said: “Guys, can we just start heading North?” I remember that every few steps we would look up at that beautiful blue sky, to see if more was coming for us. We didn’t know at that point that it was over.

I remember how silent it was on the streets, and feeling greatful I’d been able to leave a message on my dad’s answering machine when I was still at the office and had access to a land-line. “Hi Daddy, it’s me. I know you’ve probably heard about the Trade Center, and you need to know that I am far, far away from there and we’re going to try and get back to Queens now. I’ll call you when I get home. I love you.”

I remember we stopped outside some news headquarters and I bought a pretzel from a street vendor. I sat down on the curb and watched people watch the news screens because we needed the outside world to tell us what was happening to us. It was so surreal, but I wasn’t afraid anymore.

We decided that, despite hearing rumors that the bridges had been closed, we would try to get back to Astoria. There is a slight hill right before Queensboro Bridge, and as we came over the top we saw hundreds upon hundreds of people on the bridge looking like the exodus scene from The Ten Commandments. At one point an empty U-Haul stopped on the bridge and people started helping some pregnant women, small children, and the elderly up into the back of the truck to ride over. I remember looking back, over the river, and seeing the entire lower part of Manhattan encased in bilowing black smoke that rolled out over the harbor.  That four mile walk from midtown felt like forty.

I remember getting home and having a full answering machine; all three of us were temps, and none of our friends or family knew where in the city we were working on any given day. Every message was pretty much the same: “Where. Are. You? We haven’t heard from you. You better be ok. Call. Please.” That afternoon all of us who were friends in the building crammed into our neighbor’s apartment to watch the news: hugging, chugging water, and settling into our thousand-yard stare.

I remember hoping that they’d find people alive in there.

I remember when we stopped hoping.

But I don’t remember much else from those days, except that it was terribly quiet. It took so much effort even to speak to one another; we just sat on the couch, watched the news, turned it off after ten minutes, slept, and wandered aimlessly around the apartment. Some friends of ours went down to the site and brought back a 35mm film canister with some of the dust and ashes and I remember thinking: “My god, that’s people.”

It was probably a week later, when I was back in the city for the first time since the attack, that I stopped in a tourist shop and bought a WTC key chain. It was tacky and pink, with an image of the two towers on it, but I sought it out specifically because I knew that this would be one of the last WTC things made that did not have eagles, American flags, yellow ribbons, and “NEVER FORGET!” plastered all over it.

I wanted to remember before. I wanted that last little piece from before everything changed.

***

And here we are. Not dead yet, motherfucker. Not dead yet.