On Tuesday, September 11, 2001, I was awakened by my sister running out of her bedroom, crying out, “They’re attacking New York! They’re attacking New York!” I sprang from my bed and rushed to the living room to turn on the television. I saw the image of one of the towers an airplane had hit. The impact had made a crater on the side of the building. Dark smoke was pouring out of it. My mother, sister, brother, and I gathered around the television. We couldn’t understand what we were seeing. We were asking ourselves the same questions: Was this an accident? How could a plane fly into such a tall building by accident?
We watched the second airplane fly into the second tower of the World Trade Center. We gasped in disbelief. This wasn’t an accident; this was deliberate. In the following hour, news of two more hijacked commercial planes was confirmed. One had crashed in an empty field in Pennsylvania, and the other had been deliberately flown into the Pentagon.
I couldn’t stop watching the news, and by the evening, I had fallen into a mournful state from the tragic images of the day. The scenes of women fleeing from Ground Zero, with their high-heeled shoes in their hands, trying to outrun the smoke and ash from the collapsing towers, burned into my mind.