Eight years ago this morning, I was in my bathrobe at my desk looking out on a beautiful clear Manhattan morning.
I had been to a concert the night before -- weirdly enough, the Michael Jackson "tribute show" where Whitney Houston came out looking like a scarecrow and part of Michael's nose fell off.
I was typing away on emails to my friends about this very weird show when suddenly a shadow flashed over my desk, and a sound like none I had ever heard.
I live in lower Manhattan about two blocks from Broadway. Investigators later found that the first plane roared down Broadway at an altitude of about 1000 feet. To me, it sounded like the loudest propeller plane in the world, a big internal-combustion roar that was obviously a plane in desperate trouble.
I put down my coffee cup and began counting, one mississippi, two mississippi ... on six, I heard the BOOM and the floor of my building shook, as if a small earthquake had just happened.
Thus began the worst nightmare in our nation's modern history.
Where were you that day? What do you remember. Share your memories here.
UPDATE: I don't know why reading all your memories is cathartic for me, but it really is, and I thank you. PLEASE REC the diary so that others can read it too. Thanks.
UPDATEx2: Just wanted to say that I find every single memory here to be important to me. Every one is some kind of a balm to my soul. Just to know that you guys haven't forgotten, that it's still haunting you as it haunts me.
Every Saturday I take a little spin on my bike around Manhattan and I always start by riding to the WTC to say hello to the souls of the people who vanished there.