On the morning of 9/11, I was running in Central Park, enjoying one of those perfect September mornings that make New York feel limitless and full of possibility. The air was warm, the sky impossibly blue, and there was that unmistakable September feeling, part back-to-school optimism and part fresh-start energy, that always made me feel as though the city itself was beginning again. I remember not wanting to leave the park because I was happy there, moving through the sunshine and the open air, lingering in that feeling of freedom that comes from being young, healthy, and excited about the life unfolding in front of you.
Eventually, I headed back to my apartment on the Upper East Side, showered, dressed, and rushed out the door to catch the crosstown bus that would take me to the Upper West Side and then downtown on the 1/9 train. I loved that commute because it created a small pocket of time between home and work when I could read The New Yorker, observe the city around me, and slowly transition into a job that fulfilled me. In my twenties, I was working in publishing, surrounded by writers, editors, and creative people whose curiosity and intelligence energized me, and New York City was where I wanted to be.
I remember stopping on the corner near my apartment at 70th Street and 3rd Avenue to buy a hot pink pashmina because the conference room at work was perpetually cold. The vendor couldn’t make change for a twenty-dollar bill, and I was anxious because the delay was making me late. Twenty-five years later, I still find myself thinking about that brief interaction because those ordinary details became part of the chain of events that placed me on a particular train, at a particular moment, on a morning that would alter the trajectory of so many lives.
At some point during the ride, George Stephanopoulos entered the subway car with a colleague. I noticed the press passes around their necks, registered the sighting in that distinctly New York way that allows you to encounter someone famous without making much of it, and then returned to my magazine. It still felt like an ordinary morning, and there was nothing to suggest that within a matter of minutes the city, and in many ways the country, would become something entirely different.
I was heading to Houston Street, where I would exit and walk a few short blocks to my office on Varick Street, when the conductor started screaming at someone I couldn’t hear over the speaker and asked, “Where am I supposed to go?” Alarm registered. Our train was slowing and filling with smoke. At some point, a man stood up and motioned for me to take his seat.
We moved along slowly and, based on the sign on the wall, it appeared we had been diverted to Fulton Street Station. The station was filled with smoke and dust. The lights were off, but it wasn’t fully dark. None of us understood what was happening. We were allowed to exit the train, though it was not fully aligned with the platform, and then we were held underground for what felt like an eternity, surrounded by uncertainty and a growing sense that something was very wrong.
Across from me, a pregnant woman sat on the floor of the station, and I found myself unable to stop looking at her. Bricks were falling from one of the walls, and people were becoming increasingly anxious, yet what I remember most clearly is not fear but the strange suspension of not knowing what was happening above us.
Looking back, I realize there is a profound difference between sensing that something terrible has happened and understanding what that thing actually is. During those moments underground, we knew enough to be worried but not enough to grasp the magnitude of what was unfolding overhead. The grief had not yet arrived because the information had not yet reached us. The anger had not yet arrived. The horror had not yet arrived. We were standing in the narrow space between an event and our understanding of it, and in that sense we were still connected to the world we had woken up in that morning, even though it was already disappearing around us.
When we were finally guided to street level, into a mass of smoke, gray clouds, dust, and particles floating through the air, the depth of the destruction began to set in. Tears streamed down my face before a police officer stopped and told me what had happened: a plane had struck one tower, and then another plane had struck the second. It was so hard to fathom the devastation surrounding us. It didn’t seem possible. My mind raced with questions, trying to make sense of what felt impossible.
I joined thousands of New Yorkers moving north through Manhattan. I don’t really remember the walk itself, only that I was moving north, covered in dust. Everyone seemed to be walking toward something familiar, toward home, toward family, toward a version of safety that suddenly felt uncertain. Earlier that morning I had been running through Central Park, thinking about work and books and the day ahead; now I was walking uptown in a daze through a city that felt almost unrecognizable. The sky was still brilliantly blue, but it no longer looked the same to me because I no longer looked at it the same way.
At some point my flip phone rang and I heard my brother’s voice. What I remember from that moment is less about the conversation itself than about the overwhelming feeling of being found. Until then, I had simply been another person moving through the city with thousands of others, surrounded by strangers and uncertainty. Hearing his voice reconnected me to my family, and with that came the knowledge that my parents would soon know I was safe. In a day that would become defined by absence, loss, and not knowing, that feeling of being found remains one of the most powerful memories I carry.
When our office on Varick Street reopened several weeks later, another chapter of the experience began. Each evening, I passed St. Vincent’s Hospital on my walk home, and over time its walls became as deeply imprinted in my memory as Fulton Street Station. Families had covered them with photographs of missing loved ones: wedding portraits, birthday snapshots, vacation pictures, photocopies from family albums, each accompanied by handwritten descriptions and increasingly desperate hopes that someone, somewhere, might recognize the face staring back at them.
I found myself haunted not by the large details but by the smallest ones. Families listed scars, watches, ties, pieces of jewelry, and favorite articles of clothing, but the notes that stayed with me most often involved pets waiting at home. One poster explained that a woman’s golden retriever was still waiting by the front door for her return. Another described a missing husband as the favorite person of the family’s tabby cat. Those details pierced the enormity of the tragedy because they transformed the missing from anonymous faces into fully realized lives. They reminded me that every person on those walls occupied a world of relationships, routines, affections, and responsibilities that had suddenly been interrupted.
Over the course of the following year, I watched those walls evolve from a desperate search for survivors into a weathered monument to collective grief. The photographs faded as the seasons changed, yet I rarely hurried past them because each image represented not only a loss but a life once filled with ordinary mornings, future plans, beloved pets, family dinners, favorite books, and countless small moments that had seemed permanent until they weren’t.
When I think about September 11 now, all these years later, I find myself returning not only to the tragedy itself but also to the extraordinary ordinariness of the morning that preceded it. I think about running in Central Park, reading The New Yorker on the train, heading downtown to a job I loved, and moving through a city that felt full of opportunity and promise. I think about how little we understand, in the moment, that the ordinary days are often the ones we will later treasure most.
What has stayed with me after all these years is not simply the memory of fear or loss, but a profound gratitude for the life that followed. I got to leave that station. I got to answer my brother’s call. I got to spend twenty-five more years writing, teaching, working, traveling, loving, grieving, growing older, and becoming the person I was meant to become.
The older I get, the more aware I become that none of those years were guaranteed. Twenty-five years later, my heart remains with the families who lost loved ones, with the survivors whose lives were forever altered, and with a city changed in ways both visible and unseen. The memory of that day has become inseparable from my gratitude for the life that followed. Every ordinary morning, every phone call answered, every book read, every mile run, and every person loved feels connected, in some small way, to the awareness that none of it was guaranteed.
That, perhaps, is what I carry with me most: a deeper appreciation for the fragile, ordinary gift of being here.