Friday - September 11, 2020.
I was sitting in a high school classroom at Lawrence Central in Indianapolis my sophomore year and taking a standardized test, the ISTEP, when the twin towers fell. That’s not quite right. I was not taking the test the moment they fell. We were in between sections of the test and the boxy television that was hanging in the corner of the room opposite the doorway was switched on, and images of lower Manhattan were being piped into our classroom.
I can’t remember whether the sound was on, but if it was the words that the men and women on the news were saying didn’t matter. This was a moment beyond words. I remember one of the towers had a gaping hole in its side and my first thought was this: I wonder how long it will take to repair the building, to fix the blemish in the side of the tower. It didn’t cross my fourteen-year-old-mind that the whole thing might come down and collapse into a puff of smoke ––– but then it did, and then our instructor turned the television off.
Maybe we were sent to lunch early, or given time to call family –––– I can’t remember, but I doubt we picked up our pencils, went back into the ISTEP, and started filling in bubbles labeled (A) (B) (C) (D) or (E) again. At least not right away. The world had changed.
My dad is from Harlem and I knew he would have calls to make; and somehow I felt those calls pass down from him and fill my own consciousness: was everyone alright? It had been years since we had visited New York, but even as a teenager growing up in Indianapolis, I remember feeling this glow and energy from the city drawing me in, closer and closer every time I’d meet people from there, or hear stories about what it was like to live there. This went on for a decade, as it wasn’t until ten years later, 2011, when I actually moved here.
From a distance and perched upon the twentieth-floor balcony of my uncle’s apartment in Harlem, for the ten-year anniversary I could see One World Trade Center, still under construction, yet standing tall all the way downtown at the edge of Manhattan, a promise that anything that falls in New York can be built back again.
Although I stood out there for a while that morning, I didn’t have time to think of my fourteen-year-old self who was watching New York from a distance a decade before, without knowing that he’d actually live there in ten years’ time. I was twenty-four and had just taken the New York bar exam in July, and needed to find work –––– pronto. That was almost all that I could fit into my mind at the time: get a job; find work, find a way to stay here, and get your own place.
