This was the sound I awoke to.
My eyes opened and began slowly taking in their surroundings. The edge of a large glass coffee table hovered directly above my head. It held a few half empty Corona bottles and one extremely full ashtray. I was lying on a hard carpeted floor. There were no blankets covering me, and no pillows beneath my head. I was still wearing my clothes from the night before.
It was Tuesday, September 11th, 2001. I was alone, and the room was completely quiet except for the rhythmic ringing of my cell phone.
I craned my stiff neck to see the screen. NEWGUY. I picked it up and offered him a scratchy, "Hello."
"Are you watching the news?"
"Nah, man. I just woke up," I explained. Not that this actually mattered. The house wasn't equipped with cable, and the television's antenna was practically worthless. Besides...I didn't often watch the news, anyway.
"Dude, turn it on."
His tone of voice was beginning to concern me. "Why? What's going on?"
"The twin towers are gone!"
This phrase meant absolutely nothing. He was speaking in plain English, but it didn't make any sense to me in my hung-over state. For quite some time, we went through an almost vaudevillian series of questions and answers. Eventually, things began to click and I realized exactly which buildings he was talking about. It still didn't make any sense, though. How could they be "gone?"
The first thoughts that ran though my mind were all completely ridiculous. The way he described them as "gone" made it sound as though this were the result of some kind of paranormal magic. Did the citizens of New York wake up this morning and find that the world trade center had simply...disappeared?
Eventually, he succeeded in explaining to me that they had been knocked down. I remember thinking that perhaps alien ships had attacked New York. I suppose there was a kind of naivety to this thought. Perhaps I was just unwilling to believe that people could have perpetrated such an act.
At this point, I turned on the TV. It was hopeless. The static filled images it displayed only served to increase my confusion. I saw what appeared to be a cityscape with a massive gray shape moving over it. It looked how I imagine the last news transmissions would look if a mechanized monster were destroying New York.
I searched franticly, trying to find something...anything that I could jam into the back of the TV that might generate a signal.
"Dude. They're declaring martial law on the streets," he said. This would, of course, prove to be untrue, but at the time it seemed plausible. "You need to get back to Aurora now."
I gave up on fixing the signal and hurriedly left the house. Soon I was heading south on I-25. I still didn't have an entirely clear idea of what had transpired, but the reports on the radio were starting to piece everything together for me. There were planes, and there were terrorists. Soon there would be war.
I remember calling my boss from that highway. When I discovered that my store was not being closed for the rest of the day, I actually yelled at her. For some reason, I felt as though it was my employee's right to spend the day with his wife (I still agree). I was reacting very emotionally, however, and I think her calm and collected manner of speaking only made me even angrier.
The rest of the day was a blur, really.
I honestly don't remember where I was when I finally saw the footage of the towers falling. I have a vague memory of standing in a Target store, watching it on a hundred screens at once. There were small clusters of people standing all around, watching quietly. It's a possibility that I simply manufactured this memory over the years, though.
What I do know, is that the way they fell surprised me. I had spent the day thinking that they had literally fallen over. I had assumed that many other buildings had been crushed under their weight. I envisioned a line of debris stretching for dozens of blocks. I wasn't prepared for the way they just seemed to disintegrate.
Eventually, the day was over.
Within one month I had quit my job, and headed out on what I would come to know as The Great American Road Trip. If September 11th had taught me anything, it was that nothing is guaranteed to last forever. I had decided that I wanted to see as much as possible...as soon as possible.
I suppose the attack was a defining moment in my life, whether I realized it or not at the time. I didn't live in New York. I didn't lose any loved ones. The whole day still feels like an absurd dream at times...
...but everything really had changed when I woke up that morning. My life had taken a turn in an entirely new direction.
