My thoughts on the anniversary of 9/11 and the pandemic. Twenty years ago this week, on a nondescript Tuesday morning, I was trying to go back to sleep after my boyfriend left our apartment to go to work. We lived at 88 Greenwich Street in the Financial District. He worked just a few blocks away on Wall Street.
I had almost drifted back to sleep when I heard screaming coming from the hallway outside of our 12th floor apartment. I jumped up and stuck my eye up to the peephole to see what was going on. My neighbor Chris, the first person who ever showe’d me what a “mash-up” is, was screaming down the hallway, “DO YOU WANT TO DIE?” His girlfriend yelled back, “I HAVE TO GET MY ROLLERBLADES!” My first inclination, until she responded, was that there was some sort of domestic dispute going on, but her response made me think that it must be something else, and none of my business.
I went back to bed. Within 20 minutes, my entire building shook so hard that I fell out of my bed and landed on the floor. My boyfriend and I had just moved to the Financial District from Murray Hill. We found a spot in an old Art Deco bank building that had been gutted and transformed into apartments and, most importantly of all, had no broker’s fee.
We jumped at the chance to move into a newly renovated 600-square-foot flat that was near my boyfriend’s job as a computer programmer at Goldman Sachs, had tons of subway stations for my jaunts around the city as a production coordinator at MTV Commercials, and a view of the Statue of Liberty from our single window.
I was 27 and living a life that I had literally dreamed into existence. I had moved to NYC in 1999 to do an internship at MTV after working as a PA at the MTV X Games in Memphis the summer of 1998. I was already 25 years old when I moved to do the internship. I had skipped going straight to college as I just wasn’t interested after high school.
I needed a break to figure out what I wanted to do. I was never a big fan of school, skating by on charming my teachers and enough high-profile extracurriculars to scam decent grades. I was hopeful that I could get away without going at all. After my internship, MTV offered me a job, and so I decided maybe I COULD get away with not going.
I accepted and did not return to school until I went back in 2012 to finish my degree. But I digress. The week before I was lying half naked on my bedroom floor after what sounded like a huge explosion, the apartment above ours had had a water leak. It crept down through our ceiling and made the wall above our couch bubble up like a case of leprosy.
We’d had the building maintenance crew in and out of our flat daily to fix it. They had just finished repairing it the previous weekend. With this fresh in my mind, my first thought was that our building must be falling down due to shoddy workmanship on the renovations. My first thought after landing on the floor was that I needed to find out which side of the building had crashed to the ground.
So, I got up and went straight to the window that overlooked Washington Street, which was more of an alley than a street. We often used it to walk to the Amish Market just a few blocks away. I threw open the window and looked straight down to see a street that was usually empty, filled with people looking up to the east.
I immediately felt heat on my right cheek. Then, just like out of a scene in a Michael Bay action movie, I slowly turned my head towards the World Trade Center and saw a gaping fiery hole with the back end of a plane hanging out of it. We lived just two blocks away. A few floors below the plane there was a person banging on a window.
It took a few minutes, but the person finally broke through the glass of the window. They then grabbed the hand of the person behind them, and the two jumped out of the window and slammed into the ground below. That scene has run on a loop in my head for the past two decades. There’s obviously a lot more that happened that day, but I’d have to write a book to relay it all.
But the memories I have of how the entire city, and country for that matter, came together to support each other after this tragic event are also always at the forefront of my mind. If you’re over the age of 30, you probably remember this too. The city was in its Coke commercial phase, everyone bending over backwards to help each other.
We all looked into each other’s eyes as we passed each other on the street with a knowing look, like we had all been through something together and wanted to connect with empathy. And that’s why it’s so disheartening to see that this pandemic has driven such a division between people… It’s almost like we didn’t come together in that time in order to help and support other Americans, but rather everyone came together in their hatred of foreigners who attacked the country.
We didn’t care about our neighbors; we just all turned our focus to a common enemy. Would our country be in better shape if the COVID virus was a biological weapon wielded against the U. S. in an attempt to overthrow our “freedom?” Would every American trust our government to create a life-saving vaccine if it would thwart an attack by a country full of people with brown faces?
I can’t help thinking that the answer is “yes.” Please get vaccinated.