September Again...Never Forget

I was in New York on 911 in 2001. I lived five miles from the Twin Towers, where the airplanes hit in the deadliest terror attack on American soil.

Maybe I’ve told you before about that day, but I’m going to tell you again:

I was sleeping that morning, and it was before nine, and the phone rang. I ignored it and let it go to voicemail. I had a rule: no one could call me before nine. I was in grad school at Columbia University. The phone rang a second time, and I knew it was probably my Dad, but I was annoyed. I let it go to voicemail again. The third time it rang, I picked it up, just to make it stop. “What?” I answered. “Why are you calling me so early?” I moaned.

“Nina, where are you?” My dad asked.

“I’m at home,” I replied. “Why?”

“Don’t go to the World Trade Center,” he said very anxiously.

“What? Why would I go there? I don’t even know where that is!”

“They think there was a terrorist attack there.” His tone was very serious, more than usual.

“OK,” I said, still not caring at all.

“So you won’t go near there, right?” he asked.

“I don’t even know how to get there,” I answered.

I hung up the phone and put the TV on just to see what all the commotion was about since I was up anyway.

I saw the second plane go into the tower. I sat down. I started to feel a little uncomfortable. Flames were going everywhere on the TV. I heard someone yelling outside the window. They were yelling something like, “This is worse than Pearl Harbor!” Random strangers were talking to each other outside.

I got a little worried at that moment. More than a little worried. Chills were running down my body as the local TV announcers seemed like they were losing it as well. No one knew what was going on. I was confused and a little in shock.

I sat there alone watching TV for a little while until my roommate came home. She worked at the University. Apparently, they shut the school down, and she came in with tears in her eyes. That’s when tears came into my eyes. Another friend of ours showed up, and he told us how he was at a diner when the planes hit. He said a woman started screaming and crying out and went to her knees as she stared at the television, “My son works at the World Trade Center!” she cried.

I didn’t know what to do, so I decided to leave my apartment and walk around. I had a book I had to buy, so I decided to do that. I noticed some businesses were closed or empty. In some restaurants and bars, everyone was glued to the TV. Many employees could not get from downtown to uptown, where I lived, after the incident. I would randomly hear people screaming or crying in shops and restaurants, and on the street. Screaming and crying were like regular, all day. Complete strangers would look at each other on the street and shake their heads like, “Can you believe this is happening right now?” I will never forget the random people on the street who had debris all over them and looked like they had been in a war zone.

We didn’t know if there would be more attacks. We didn’t know anything. Where I was, you could not see anything, not even the smoke in the air. The terrible smells would come soon after.

It was the incident, the tragedy.

I walked over to the bookstore, and it was very empty, with only one person working there, it seemed. He was a black dude with long dreads. He looked like someone I’d want to get to know. I found my book and went up to the register to buy it. I took out my debit card.

“Ahhh, the credit card machines are not working,” he said. The phone lines were also dead at that point.

“Can I write you a check?” I asked.

“Whatever,” he said in a dismissive tone. I think he couldn’t believe I was buying a book for a literature class while the world seemed like it was self-destructing. I would later find out that class was canceled the next day.

I took out my checkbook. Back then, I actually carried a checkbook with me. Nowadays, I don’t remember the last time I wrote a check. Anyway, I started to write my check like a good student. “What’s the date?” I asked the guy and looked up at him. He had such a cool style, an earring, and everything.

“What’s the date?” he asked in a loud voice. “You don’t know the date? It’s September 11th, this date will be remembered in history!”

“Oh, OK,” is all I could manage to say. Little did I know, he was right. I had no idea that the date was how we would refer to this day in the future.

So it’s been many, many years since it happened. I don’t know what to say. I don’t believe it’s been that long. I remember it like it was yesterday. I lived in the city where it happened, and I was not scared. I was in survival mode. People had died all around us, and there was something special all of a sudden about being alive.

I went to candlelight vigils of people who had died, and every day I saw posters of ‘missing’ persons who were probably dead all over town.

The truth is, when you live through a war-like disaster, all of a sudden, little things don’t matter as much. I once went on a date with a guy years later, who had a huge American Flag in his living room. I asked him about it, and he was from Iraq. This is what he said: “I love America. When I go outside, I don’t have to worry that I might die before I come back home.”

It’s that simple. Before 911, you didn’t really think that something greater than you could kill you and everyone you loved in an instant. There are war-torn areas all over the world where this is the truth on a daily basis. We just got a little taste of that in New York and other places in America on 911.

A taste is enough, believe me. I don’t need any more death, destruction, and violence to understand that I have it real good. Instead of being afraid of another attack, I’m thankful that I survived, that I still survive, and that no one I know was hurt or killed in the deadly terrorist attack.

I had a Muslim friend of Pakistani descent in grad school, and on 911, his friends joked with him and told him that the police were gonna get him since by the end of the day, everyone had determined that the hijackers were Muslim. My friend laughed it off. In the morning, he heard banging on his front door. “It’s the Police! FBI! Open up!”

“Fuck off!” he yelled back, assuming they were his friends.

They kept banging on the door. He kept swearing at them; he used every name in the book. Finally, they said, “Sir, if you don’t open this door, we will have to break it down!”

All of a sudden, he got scared. He opened the door to three men with guns and badges. They sat him down and asked him about every email he had sent in the past three years. They had printed out every email and phone correspondence he had in the past three years. My friend happened to have the same first name initial and last name as one of the hijackers. He told the police that he was born in Kansas. They asked him to provide pictures to prove that.

He wore a three-piece suit when he went home to Kansas for Thanksgiving. He liked to smoke pot and was worried about it since the police were obviously watching him. He was worried that he might get arrested for marijuana possession. I asked him how he was doing that fall, all he could say was, “I want to concentrate on my writing, but I’m too busy trying not to end up in jail.”

My Sikh brothers who wore turbans were being called “Osama Bin Laden” on the streets. They were being attacked, and everyone assumed they were Muslim. 911 didn’t make me hate Muslims; in fact, people often think I’m Muslim. I get ‘randomly’ selected after 911 every time I go to the airport. The incident on 911 did not make me hate more. It made me love more.

I remember each and every person who tried to call me before the phone lines went down. I remember staying in contact with my father through email until the phones were fixed. I remember my mom’s face when she finally saw me after the attacks when I went home to Michigan for Thanksgiving. Maybe I never really understood how much they loved me until that day. My best friends who did not live in New York called me frantically, asking if I was OK. My random neighbor from the year before had moved to Idaho, and he called me to make sure I was still alive.

I never valued the fact that I’m alive until then. Yeah, I forget what’s important and lose my way all the time. But I know what I’m made of now. I marched on with my life, knowing full well that there could have been more attacks and that my life was pretty much in danger.

I didn’t go to Ground Zero, where the attacks happened, until April of that year. I went with two close friends of mine who came from Michigan. My friends and I were walking towards the devastated area, and we got lost. I saw an older white woman walking down the street towards us. I asked her, “Ma’am, where is the World Trade Center?” Obviously, not the most sensitive thing to say since the World Trade Center was now a bunch of rubble and debris.

“I don’t know what this is about, but I don’t want any part of it,” she said and turned around and went back in the direction she was coming from. I wonder sometimes if she thought I was making a joke, or that I was just this horrible human being. Did she think the three of us were Muslim? We sure looked it.

Shortly after 911, I remember seeing a white woman on Oprah who lived in Missouri or something saying she could not leave her house because she was so afraid of another terrorist attack. When I saw her, I had to shut the TV off. People will make anything into their personal problem, but this was personal to me. I walked around New York City on 911 without fear. I just did it. That day and every day afterward. I wasn’t afraid to leave my house; I’ve never been afraid to leave my house. But I went back to Michigan and heard stories about people much more afraid than I ever was. Was it the television coverage? I never watched that; it hit too close to home. I saw it on the streets.

That woman in Missouri obviously had other issues, but she was making this about 911, and I was pissed. I get annoyed when people don’t realize how good they have it. Yes, I’m a first-world person who doesn’t always realize my own privilege, but I am aware enough to know that I live in a country that keeps me relatively safe.

I mean, I still think we spend far too much money on the armed forces. And I think we should embrace a more tolerant policy towards people of Muslim descent. But I never leave the house wondering if I’ll ever come back. That same Iraqi man I went on that date with told me a story about some girls he saw studying on a train in Iraq, one half of the train blew up, and the girls did not miss a beat, they continued studying as if it didn’t happen. They paid it no mind. That’s how used to violence they were.

I don’t ever want to get used to that.

Luckily, I don’t have to. Hopefully, I never will.

Every year, they say the names of everyone who died on 911. As my father says, “In America, your life matters.”

I’m not really a ‘patriot’ and I don’t really love ‘religion,” but I feel compelled to say: God bless America.

nina