A part of all New York: WTC

You’ve seen the images so many times that you’re sick of it all. Twisted metal jutting out of smoking rubble, people’s faces disfigured with horror, dusty firemen raising American flags, tearful eagles (?!), twin towers framed by a purple sunrise—this is 9/11 as you know it. Many of us were in middle school or beginning high school when we saw those two planes crash into the World Trade Center towers on TV. The footage probably cut into a commercial for Tom Cruise’s latest action movie where whole cities were being blown up by bad guys, and suddenly the screen flashes to two enormous towers emitting bulbous, black smoke, when a grave Tom Brokaw comes on—not Tom Cruise—and announces that the U.S. has been attacked. Was this reality? For me, it was Hollywood’s latest production.

Being cloistered away in central Massachusetts, and never having been to New York, I felt no particular connection to the tragedy. The images of destruction and anguish were no different from those coming out of the Middle East. I was watching death on television, but I had seen it so many times before that the only thing out of the ordinary was the program’s lack of advertisements. I remember being most affected by seeing my Croatian French teacher crying that afternoon, and wondering why this tragedy was any different from those going on every day around the world.

It wasn’t until I came to New York for college that I began to grasp what happened that day. Living uptown, I would look south to the horizon, and occasionally see the two dominating figures of the Financial District topped with columns of smoke, reaching higher than any architect could envision. When I briefly lived in the FD this past summer, I would jog past the WTC site and look up into the void where the buildings used to stand, and see people jumping to avoid burning to death. But it wasn’t until today, when I visited the Tribute WTC Visitor Center on the south side of Ground Zero, that I cried like my French teacher.

Our journalism class was given a tour of Ground Zero’s southwest perimeter by John Henderson, who on that day watched the towers burn through the arch at Washington Square. We were told of the day’s timeline in minutes, the rescue teams, survivors’ stories, the building itself, and the business of identifying tens of thousands of human remains. It was hard to hear about workers on the top floors of the towers who had to hack away at the stairwell door with an ax, because it was jammed shut by the force of the plane’s impact. Or of the people trapped in their offices, sending confused emails to loved ones, not knowing those were their last words. Or of the firefighter in the north tower’s stairwell, buried under the wreckage of the entire building, angry because it would now take him days to die instead of only a painless instant.

But what really got me was a piece of scrap metal behind a glass case in the museum. It was salvaged from the ruined mass of glass, concrete, metal, and people: a ripped piece of sheet metal with the outline of an airplane window. Looking through the hollow oval, I caught my reflection in the glass, and wondered if the passenger sitting next to this window did the same before their plane smashed into the side of the north or south tower.