So my plan was to gather some photos that capture some of the less gruesome, but still extremely powerful images that resonate in my mind from September 11th and the days that followed: the flyers of missing persons posted on walls, subway stations and payphones everywhere in NYC; the military tanks preventing everyone but residents from moving any lower in Manhattan than 14th Street; the empty streets and dazed, meandering pedestrians on September 12th; the candlelight vigils.

Alas, I am not posting those pictures. I braced myself for the deluge of images long-blocked from my mind when I clicked “images” after googling “9/11,” but I still was not prepared for it. A moment scanning the images and I changed my mind. It’s too much. Too soon. Even ten years later, it’s just too soon.

So back to my backup drive I went to dig up another instance of writing-as-therapy from the days after September 11, 2001.

As background, this one was written in December 2001. We were living in Chelsea in Manhattan. I had only moved back to NY from Washington, D.C. a year or so earlier. Elliott and I were once again working in our office building located a block from “the pile” at Ground Zero. I could see it from my office. I could smell it the moment I stepped outside my apartment building and all day at work.

Each morning I would go into my office and sit at a freshly dusted desk — recently equipped with a company-provided face mask and flashlight just in case — but every day I would leave a desk with a layer of fine dust that had seeped into the building one way or another and settled on every surface.

Like many New Yorkers, I was living with post-traumatic stress disorder. Of course, I didn’t realize that then. I just knew that I jumped out of my skin with every noise — a plane overhead, a truck hitting a pothole, the phone ringing. I knew I would not get through the day without flashbacks of what I experienced the morning of September 11th. And I knew that that night, whatever night it was, I wouldn’t sleep.

I’m still having nightmares. This time all the recognizable buildings of Washington were packed close together like Manhattan. My path home took me through the courtyard they surrounded. I began noticing people looking horrified — the not so occasional gasp, and a smell of smoke. That awful stench of smoke mixed with burning plastic and wire. I turned around to see the Old Executive Office Building (which spontaneously morphed into the Capitol Building at times) engulfed in smoke and the final effect of a slow burn. It was crumbling. Not in its entirety, but piece by piece. Debris surrounding the windows couldn’t hold on any longer and the structure itself began to look questionable.

 

I could feel the tears rush to my eyes, but I forced them back knowing, from my previous experience, that there wasn’t time for fear yet. That would have to wait. I hesitantly forced my fear into the little strength that remained in my body as I quickened my pace. It was a losing battle. I looked back and saw the OEOB also in the midst of a losing battle. It wasn’t going to make it.

“Not again!” I surprisingly gasped out loud as the tears succeeded in their coup. I felt the little bravery that remained in my body drain out through tears and uncontrollable mumbling. I wondered, “Why isn’t anybody running? Didn’t you learn anything?” Yet still I didn’t want to look foolish. The contradicting demands to run for survival or to remain calm began to tear my own structure down piece by piece and I found I couldn’t force myself to run anymore. The fear had taken over, and I also may not make it.

Then the black night of reality rescued me and all that remained was the fear and relief that it hadn’t happened. At least not yet.

 

After that day that shook our perhaps unjustified sense of security, it was expressed over and over that “things will never be normal again.”

“Nothing will ever be the same. I’ll never be the same.”

“When things get back to normal, whatever that is…”

 

Meanwhile, in other parts of the country, normalcy quickly settled in as the days drifted by, but here “Ground Zero” is still a part of our daily vocabulary. The city seems to stop for a half-second at the sound of each airplane flying overhead. The overwhelming presence of police, military and various forms of security are becoming less noticeable. And then there are the signs – the messages of hope and remorse from the world over. Photocopies posted on subway walls are no longer advertisements one step up from litter, but rather mini-shrines for those lost. Pictures of young and old, that seem to deserve homage and call to each passerby for at least a glance. The depictions of the skyline from “before everything” immediately draw a somber response. The words “World Trade Center” are almost taboo, unless spoken in the context of tragedy.

 

Yet somehow, nearly 3 months later, normal doesn’t seem so far away.

But then the nightmares come.

It’s easy to talk about the events of September 11, 2001 on a grand scale. We hear it all the time. But, like it or not, for me it’s always been about the small details: the weather, the faces on the subway, the sound of broken window glass under my feet on Fulton St., the pungent smell, the mutterings of strangers, the sound of the earth rumbling before the towers collapsed. There are so many more I couldn’t possibly list them all here.

PTSD brought those details back to life for me on a regular basis for years after September 11th. Writing was my best therapy. So once again, I’ll take you on a flashback with me to those eery, uncomfortable days in the Fall of 2001 in New York, when I wrote this in the middle of the night.

I’m afraid to go to sleep. I don’t even like to lie in my bed with my head on the pillow because I know they are coming — the nightmares. The scenes, the sounds, the horror, the fear — they all come back in the nightmares. Last night was one of the worst.

The Jumpers. The Runners. The Rescue Workers. It’s so easy to classify the participants by these simple titles. Titles that easily designate hundreds and thousands. The vast numbers make it easy to ignore the individuals. Not that we don’t all mourn, but how do you single out one stranger among thousands? In my case, you see just one Jumper. One man plunging to his death. Witness the last 3o seconds of one man’s life. Witness the fear that enveloped his body. That one man’s death would have been unfortunate enough, but he was one of so many more. And I have witnessed that death not just once, but over and over in my mind.

I see it when I blink. I see it when I sleep. Last night in my nightmares, I saw it through his eyes. The windows passing upward, the tremendous wind catching my body like a sail, the complete and utter helplessness. The point far beyond return when hysteria seemed inevitable and senseless at the same time. But I didn’t see the ground. I couldn’t look, just as I couldn’t that day. The final five seconds were just too cruel to bear with its all too certain ending.

I, for one, think this is a good thing. First of all, the attacks were 8 years ago now and it is about time that justice is served. Secondly, I think that a prosecution in a U.S. criminal court is, in fact, serving justice. How many times in the last 8 years have we heard the word “justice” thrown around, particularly by our government leaders, as what we stand for, the reason we are at war, the reason we will not tolerate x, y or z, the reason liberals/conservatives are wrong on issues a, b, or c. It’s all about justice for those who lost their lives that day. Justice for all, as we like to say.

As a lawyer, I have had occasion to think about the pros and cons of our justice system many times, personally and professionally. Perhaps blinded by the tens of thousands of dollars I invested in obtaining a law degree and license to practice law,  I actually believe we have a damn good justice system. Yes, sometimes it fails. But the core of our system is the American citizen – the juror, the judge – and humans are not perfect. And a system that does not rely upon human beings would be one without sympathy and reasoned thought and would be imperfect as well. Our system strives to do what any good justice system should do:  it provides an opportunity for an accused to face his accusers and the evidence against him without a pre-determined outcome.

We trust our justice system every day to determine whether a presumably innocent person has violated the law such that he should be permanently deprived of his civil rights, freedom and even his life.What has some people upset about the civilian trial of KSM, from what I can tell, is that there is NOT a pre-determined outcome. It seems people are only willing to allow “justice” in this case if it’s no justice at all.

Look, I hate the terrorists as much as anybody else. I am a New Yorker. I ran from the crumbling towers that day. I felt the pain of the victims and their families. I want the people responsible to pay for their crimes. BIG TIME. I want it to hurt, slowly and for a long time. But I do not want our country to spiral into one that throws justice to the wayside when there is an iota of a chance that it will not turn out the way we want; when it might show that what we thought to be true, was not so. That kind of blind confidence in the “truth” and what is “right”  — to hell with justice — is what led to the Salem witch trials, Japanese-American internment camps and McCarthyism. Those are shameful times in American history and that is not an America we should beckon back. If we are willing to sacrifice justice, which has long been heralded as a core value of American society, why fight terrorism at all? They will have already won “death to America.”

“Were you there?”

It doesn’t get any more specific than that. It doesn’t need to. Yes, I was there.

“What did you see?”

That’s when I revert to my automated response. Please press 1 for the long version, 2 for the short version.

I rarely give the real long version because it’s really long. I mean that day felt like an eternity to me. I remember almost every minute of the first several hours, even if I’d prefer not to.

Eight years later the abbreviation “9/11″ is trite. It has come to be synonymous with so many other concepts — terrorism, a turning point, fear-mongering, the unjust war in Iraq, the Bush era, al quaeda. I can’t stand the thought that people, including myself, sometimes can’t separate the tragedy of September 11th from the politics that followed.

As I thought about what to blog on this weighty date, I kept drifting from my emotional memories into political rants. Exactly what I don’t want to do. That’s not what I think this day should be about.

I considered chronicling the long version, the one I never tell. But to be honest, I’m not sure I could anymore. Not because I don’t remember the details. Believe me, I do. I just think that finding the precise language to describe those images would too severely open old wounds.  So I decided to dig up some thoughts I wrote in the days immediately following September 11th, 2001. When it was fresh, raw and pure tragedy. When I was putting memories on paper hoping just to get them out of my head. It didn’t work. Ironically, I’m sharing them now as a reminder.

New Yorkers are a strange breed. As natives, we pride ourselves in our crass reputation only because inside we find it funny. New Yorkers cold? Ha! That could only come from someone who is only visiting or has never been. Someone who has not seen the unity of parades on Labor Day and Columbus Day, or the obliging offer of help to a lost tourist. And certainly a comment like that would have come before September 11, 2001.

That morning, like so many New Yorkers, I woke up and headed to work in the financial district downtown – the third largest business district in the country, following only Midtown Manhattan and Chicago. Stepping out of the subway onto Fulton Street that morning, was like stepping into a time machine that brought me to some horrific period in the future where chaos rules and fear seeps into every aspect of life.

Already Flight 11 had plunged itself into the South Tower of the World Trade Center, an event I was aware of when I left for work and thought it was a horrible freak accident. What I was not aware of, as I walked through broken glass and panicked people toward my office, was that since I entered the vacuum of the subway system a second plane had hit Tower 2 and the reality struck terror, sorrow and strength into each and every witness.

The air was pungent with the smell of burning plastic and electrical wires. A heavy gray cloud lingered over lower Manhattan. As I turned onto Broadway toward my office, which stands just before those two glorious towers on any other day, I now just stood in the midst of sirens, onlookers, our heroes in uniform, ailing victims and the sound of sobbing, worry and the nearly constant exclamations of disbelief.

I myself stood in disbelief with tears in my eyes one block away from that symbol of New York. That bank of memories to so many New Yorkers. At that moment it was just a heart-wrenching reminder that the world had changed. It indeed was smaller. We were no longer immune to the world’s horror.

The sight of a man, dressed in his business attire, jumping from what had to have been close to the ninetieth floor of Tower 1 – a height that even most city folk outside of New York can hardly imagine – brought my heartache to what I thought was its extreme limits. What unfathomable duress and agony the people inside those walls must have been enduring to choose the certain death of that terrifying fall to remaining where they were.

My stomach turned, and if not for the numbness of shock and horror, I probably would have felt anger toward the monsters who perpetrated this act. But I didn’t. All I could feel was fear and sorrow for those people trapped inside – some of whom I might know – and their families and my family and my friends and the list went on and on as I thought of all the people in pain at this moment. All the people frantically worried about their loved ones. And then the unthinkable happened.

As we stared at these towers trying to absorb this reality, one second stretched into an eternity. A loud boom shook the South Tower, the concrete canyons, the nearby windows, the earth, my soul. The crowd straightened and the words “Bomb!” and “Run!” and “Oh my God!” fluttered through the streets. Then the plume of dust shooting from the top of Tower 1 began the stampede. Adrenaline carried us, New Yorkers, in all directions – mine being toward the South Street Seaport. I feared being trampled, being crushed by debris, being choked with smoke. I feared the same for others. And as New Yorkers often do in times of trouble, we pulled together. We offered guidance to each other; we shouted the safest places to run and pulled each other along as the smoke caught up to us.

As we reached the relative safety of the Seaport, word spread that the tower was gone; rumors spread that the second one came down as well. In fact Tower 2 still remained at the time, but the thickness of the smoke blinded us from the truth and it didn’t really matter. New York would never be the same.

Together, as New Yorkers, as humans, as daughters, sisters, husbands, fathers, we cried. Fear turned into tears and we all cried. We cried for the skyline that will never look the same, the people we will never see again, the firemen and police officers we saw running toward the Towers just minutes earlier, the evil that overtook our home, and the future that we can not imagine.

Today, we still cry for New York and our people. But we also well up with pride in our city and nation, our strength and unity, our rescue worker heroes, and our supportive, charitable neighbors. Our secret’s out.