Submitted by Karen Fassuliotis
On September 11, I will ask myself the question: How can it be twenty-five years ago when I can close my eyes and still see that day unfold as if it were yesterday?
I was there.
On September 11, 2001, I was a new lawyer working on the 57th floor of the Chase Building in lower Manhattan. It was a beautiful September morning—the sky impossibly blue, the air clear. I had planned to leave work early that afternoon to help my parents celebrate their anniversary, a little late.
As I emerged from the Wall Street station a mere minute after the first plane struck the North Tower, I didn’t know what had happened. I saw smoke pouring down, papers falling through the streets and people running. Then I saw an airplane ticket lying on the ground. I looked up and saw the black hole in the North Tower.
At first, we all thought it was an accident.
Then I saw the firefighters.
They were racing toward the building as everyone else was running away. I can still remember their faces as they passed, hanging onto the back of a fire truck.
I made my way to my office on the 57th floor, where I had a direct view of the World Trade Center. I still had to work and it was an accident after all.
Then I saw the second plane. It came down the Hudson River, banked left toward the South Tower and glided toward the building. I heard the engines throttle down. For a split second, I could see the faces of people sitting inside the plane.
There was an explosion, a fireball, as I watched the nose of the plane emerge from the other side of the building.
That was the moment I understood. This was no accident. America was under attack.
I ran down 57 floors of stairs yelling for my colleagues and strangers to leave. When I reached the street, I lingered then immediately headed north.
As I walked, the South Tower collapsed. The dust cloud came down the street and I ran ahead of it, physically unscathed.
Eventually, somehow, I made it home. I was safe. I was alive.
A few days later, I returned to work. Lower Manhattan was no longer the place I once knew. Soldiers stood in the streets. Bomb-sniffing dogs searched buildings. The smell of smoldering wreckage stung your nose and hung in the air.
I kept the shades in my office closed, a classic case of post-traumatic stress. I couldn’t bear to look at the place where the towers had been.
For years, I carried what I had seen quietly, rarely talking about it, although I did write about it. Life moved forward, as life always does. Careers continued. Families grew. Birthdays came and went. Twenty-five years passed.
But, for me, September 11 never became just a date on the calendar.
What stays with me most is not only what I saw that day. It is what I understood afterward.
I went home, they didn’t.
That is the sentence I have carried for twenty-five years.
The people in those towers went to work that morning expecting an ordinary day. They had meetings to attend, calls to make, coffee to finish. Some were looking forward to seeing their children. Some had plans for that evening.
They thought they were going home. They never got the chance.
There were everyday people who had kissed their family goodbye that morning – a mother who would never pick up her child from school, a father who would never see his daughter graduate, a grandparent who would never hold a grandchild, a fiancé who would never see a wedding, or a child who would never see Disneyland or have another vacation.
There were firefighters, police officers, transit workers and other emergency workers who ran toward people in danger while the rest of us were trying to escape.
They were not numbers.
That is what I find hardest to comprehend after twenty-five years. Not only that it was thousands of people and first responders who were lost that morning, but that so many ordinary lives simply stopped in the middle of an ordinary day.
People who had promised to call later. Children waiting to see their parents. Spouses waiting for someone to walk through the door. Parents expecting to hear a familiar voice. They had birthdays and favorite foods. They had families, friends and unfinished conversations. They had plans for that evening and plans for the rest of their lives.
The people who were lost were not preparing to become part of history. They were simply living their lives.
I think often about that beautiful September morning—the blue sky, the clear air, the people heading to work, the city beginning another ordinary day. No one looking up at the sky that day could have imagined what was coming.
And then, in a matter of hours, thousands of lives became memories.
Twenty-five years have passed since that morning. A quarter of a century. The world has moved forward. Buildings were rebuilt. Children grew up. New generations were born. The skyline changed. New York healed.
But for the people who were lost, September 11 will always be the morning they left home – the morning they went to work, or boarded a plane to go somewhere. They were firefighters, police and first responders who were simply doing their job. It was the morning their lives were still unfolding.
Before they became names read aloud, photographs placed on memorials, or numbers remembered in history books, they were people with places to go, people to see, things to finish, work to be done, and lives they expected to continue.
For them, there was only that beautiful September morning.
They all left home that morning believing they would come back. They had no reason to believe otherwise.
I went home. They didn’t.
And twenty-five years later, that is the part I still cannot leave behind.