I was two weeks shy of thirty.
I lived on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.
In between jobs, I had gone out the night before and stayed out late, so I slept late.
My mother called me around nine in the morning and told me a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center.
I did not believe her.
I walked into my living room and turned on CNN and saw it myself. I still cannot tell you what went through my head. It was the most shocking thing that had ever happened. I could not understand it. By the time the second plane hit, it was beyond understanding. What could possibly have happened?
The towers marked New York City. That is what they were to me. I had been to the top once or twice. I do not like heights, so I did not go back. They were not personal to me. They were the thing you looked for to know where you were.
And the towers had already been a target.
In February 1993, a truck bomb went off in the garage beneath the North Tower and killed six people. The blind sheikh, Omar Abdel-Rahman, was later convicted of conspiring with the men who did it, and of plotting a wider campaign against New York landmarks, bridges and tunnels. Someone had tried to bring those buildings down once already. We knew that. But of course, life went on.
My mother was sixty. She worked for a nonprofit in Chelsea, on 14th Street and Seventh Avenue. She and my father lived in Brooklyn but no trains were running to Brooklyn. So she walked 60 blocks, the whole way uptown as buses were sparse and trains were not running.
I stayed home and watched the news without stopping (I remember it was all CNN). Emails came into my old AOL account, because that is how people reached each other then. A friend in California wrote to ask if I was alright.
I went around the corner to a coffee shop and tried to lock eyes with people. Everyone looked like a caricature. Everyone looked like the man in Munch’s The Scream.
When my mother finally got to me, we stopped at the Red Cross to see if we could give blood or do anything at all. Then we walked to the river, to the pier at West 69th Street, and stood there with everyone else. We looked south at the smoking towers. Nobody could believe what they were looking at.
I do not remember what we said to each other. Our phones were not cameras. I have no photographs of that day.
I have no pictures of 9/11.
Every picture I have seen of it belongs to someone else.
The pictures I own are in my head, and they are permanently seared there.
The soot on my windowsill. The smell, or my memory of the smell. The sunshine. It was a beautiful September day, and September is one of the most beautiful months in New York. The walks with friends. The flip-flopping in my mind, hour after hour. How could it be.
How could people do this to each other? It was incomprehensible.
25 years later, it is still incomprehensible.
Going down to Ground Zero with friends to help. I cannot even remember what the volunteering was. We put up flyers with the faces of missing people on them. I cannot imagine we believed anyone would be found alive.
It felt like it never ended. We were inside one long nightmare. Then the anthrax letters started.
That is when it turned apocalyptic. We were still trying to pick up the pieces and understand what had happened to us, and suddenly we were not safe in our own homes either. Every piece of mail was suspect. We were told to wear gloves, or to wash our hands after opening anything. The images of contaminated letters were on the news constantly. That was terrifying in a different way.
I could not sleep for six months.
I was afraid to fall asleep and wake up to another horror. The insomnia was severe. I needed medication to fall asleep at all.
My normal sleep never came back.
For those same six months, I could not talk about anything else. There was no other subject. It was everything, everywhere I went. The news did not contradict my private life, because every channel was reporting on some angle of it every hour of every day.
I read a piece in the New York Times Magazine that I still think about. Andrew Sullivan brilliantly laid out the historical and religious roots of what had happened to us. He argued that this was a religious war. It was, he wrote, “a war of fundamentalism against faiths of all kinds” that had made their peace with freedom and modernity. He also said we were not near the end of the conflict but at the start of it. He was right. The full text is free to read here.
“Perhaps the most important thing for us to realize today is that the defeat of each of these fundamentalisms required a long and arduous effort. The conflict with Islamic fundamentalism is likely to take as long. For unlike Europe's religious wars, which taught Christians the futility of fighting to the death over something beyond human understanding and so immune to any definitive resolution, there has been no such educative conflict in the Muslim world. Only Iran and Afghanistan have experienced the full horror of revolutionary fundamentalism, and only Iran has so far seen reason to moderate to some extent. From everything we see, the lessons Europe learned in its bloody history have yet to be absorbed within the Muslim world. There, as in 16th-century Europe, the promise of purity and salvation seems far more enticing than the mundane allure of mere peace. That means that we are not at the end of this conflict but in its very early stages.”
Andrew Sullivan writing in The New York Times October 7, 2001
For the first six months after that day, f I traveled somewhere, 9/11 is what we talked about. If I went out locally, that is what we talked about. When I was not talking about it, I was thinking about it. Turning it over and over.
Then, at about six months, something changed.
Every time somebody asked me about 9/11 after that, it felt like they were opening a new wound. The scar had started to close, barely. My sleep had not come back, but I could function.
And I did not want to talk about it anymore.
That is how I learned something I now repeat often.
After the height of the pandemic lockdowns, the school closures, and the mandates, we had about six months. Six months to collect the stories before the people who lived them put the rawest part of themselves away and stopped being able to talk about it, or stopped wanting to. I assumed I was not unusual. I assumed many people were like me.
That is why we made 15 DAYS when we did, and why we made it so fast, while we were still living through the experience of it all.
For new subscribers, or if you missed it, I am including the 15 DAYS trailer.
On September 23, it will be one year since 15 DAYS premiered on X.
A year on, I keep hearing the same thing I heard in 2001. Incomprehension. People still cannot comprehend what was done to children, to families, to the sick and the dying and the people who were kept from them. The picture is still not clear to most people. They know pieces but not how they fit or who decided what, or why.
The level of human incomprehension in both events is nearly unparalleled in my lifetime.
And I have started to think they sit on one continuum. From September 11 to now. The same questions. How could it be. How could people do this to each other. Who decided. How/when/will it happen again.
I will tell you something I have not admitted in print. I misspeak. Sometimes I will be talking about one and say the other. I will say 9/11 when I mean Covid, or Covid when I mean 9/11. Whatever part of me sorts experience into categories put those two things together.
Both were collective trauma. Both arrived as a rupture in our ordinary lives. Both were followed by months (almost years) where there was no other subject. Both wounds were scabbing over before we finished understanding them.
That is why we filmed when we did (mainly 2022-2023). The people in 15 DAYS spoke when they still felt the need to, while the stories were raw, painful and immediate.
You can watch 15 DAYS on Substack, Amazon Prime, or on Apple TV.
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I read a story last week of an aspect of 9/11 I had never considered before. When this happened all the hospitals called all the available ER and trauma staff in. But nobody showed up to be treated.
"We put up flyers with the faces of missing people on them. I cannot imagine we believed anyone would be found alive."
It was a digital event. You either walked away thinking what did I just walk away from. Or were one of the 2,753 souls that passed.
The average human is a go-along sheep willingly obeying the powers-that-be du jour. As food for carnivore predators, they live in fear. They feel safe only in a herd. A tribe. Any “us versus them” environment. Feel safe only in a mono-thinking herd of suppressed-minded idiots. Few humans ever dare much less are taught or learn to be true fearless warriors or shepherds. Able to see and evaluate the brutal reality that there are people and entities around us who will never play by Marquis of Queensbury Rules.
I had the “fortune” to have spent the 15 years prior to 911 often doing first responder work usually involving bloody and dead people in wilderness areas. And, decades of experience in hospitals dealing with death. I’ve also a deep understanding of US History including Constitutional law. Thus, sudden lethal tragedies of thousands dying fast or governments trying to stomp on human freedoms are things I notice fast.
On 911 while in California, I was alerted by an East Coast relative about the Twin Tower attacks as smoke began rising from the Pentagon. Flipped on a television to watch. The second I watched Building 7 suddenly fall for zero reason I instantly knew - call it ESP - deep in my gut “that is the last attack.” Never lost one night’s sleep over 911 nor when the Next Big Media Story broke about a Fort Detrick “weapons lab insider” trying to whip up hysteria with powdered anthrax in merely 4 mailed letters. I laughed at the obvious “anthrax scare” link to the Orwellian Patriot Act then on the floor of Congress for discussions. Laughed, too, at the idiotic March 2020 mask on-off-on farce. Eye rolling still at anyone gullible enough to take an experimental genetic slice n’ dice prion bioweapon injected serum.
Read a couple days ago local news about the death rates of a California federalized search & rescue team who worked the Twin Towers for 300 hours before EPA finally admitted they should all be using respirators to filter out the massive amount of now pulverized asbestos in those buildings (and all over the most intense dust cloud fallout region, too) which had made it far too expensive for the brand new building owners to do any big remodels on those fallen building. Those Menlo Park firemen are also still suffering horrid PTSD from what they saw and had to handle on the Pile… despite having the best possible mental and physical therapies available to them from their employers. Whelp, the USPO got a photo of one of those unmasked firemen for a postage stamp. Edward Bernays purrs in his grave.