She woke up Tuesday morning around 8:30 and laid in bed for a while. She heard a low-flying plane overhead, very loud and thought, “Is that normal?” Being new to the city, she wasn’t familiar with regular flight paths. But she remembers thinking it was highly unusual. She flipped the news on as she did every morning and saw the image of one of the Towers smoking. It was so weird, she thought it was a movie clip, so she went over to the window, opened her blinds, greeted her cat sitting in the window and sure enough off in the distance, one of the Towers was smoking. She just stood there in disbelief for a few moments, thinking the low-flying plane she heard overheard before she got up was probably a little plane that someone accidentally flew into the Towers. How strange.
She went to the bathroom and when she came back out, the second Tower had already been hit and was smoking. She stood there in stunned silence, confused. She knew something was happening but she didn’t know what to do. And yet, something inside her knew it was important to document history unfolding before her eyes. So, she did what a lot of people would do – she took a photo. Here is her story in her words.
“Before the second Tower was on fire, I called [my partner at the time] and left a voicemail. The phone lines were still working at that point. That’s when I decided it was time to leave. I went downstairs to a pet store in the block where my building was. I was gonna put my cat in it and leave town. My payment didn’t go through at the pet store because the phone lines were down and credit cards weren’t going through. What do I do about my cat?”
“I thought – you know what? I’m out of here. If they’re setting bombs or if it’s planes, is this gonna be across the whole island of Manhattan?”
“So I just started walking from East 23rd Street and walked north to 34th Street. A lot of people were leaving, walking out of the city on the Brooklyn Bridge. I just wanted to get out of Manhattan. I was new to the city, I was just walking. There was no plan. When I looked to my left toward the Financial District, I could only see smoke. I was only 30 blocks north of the site. I walked in the other direction. I was just gonna go as far north as I could go. Then I saw the Empire State Building and saw other places.”
“After about 10 blocks, I thought – who knows what else they’ve got going on. So I just turned around and went back to my apartment. I hadn’t even started school yet. I didn’t know anybody there.”
“You sit there in shock, you don’t know what’s gonna happen. I went to the roof deck on the building. We were all just up there watching. No one was talking. We could see the outline of the buildings and there was more and more smoke. But suddenly, we didn’t see the outline anymore. We didn’t feel a thing from the building falling. We didn’t hear anything. Is that what I think I’m seeing? We weren’t sure. Our cell phones weren’t working. We tried to use a payphone but you couldn’t get any calls in or out at that point. Then there were no phone calls in or out of the city for several hours.”
The family started calling her partner when no one could get through to Lesli. Our parents, other siblings, our grandmother. Luckily, everyone knew she was okay because she had managed to get a voicemail out. But sometime in the afternoon, Mom and Dad eventually got through to her. Our mother said even though she knew she was okay, she was always going to worry about her babies no matter what.
“The sky was so blue, not a cloud in the sky that day. It was unbelievable, the weather. Crystal blue sky. I saw one of the Towers fall, I don’t remember where I was for the other one. I would go up there for the first few days on the roof deck and you would see fighter jets circling the city every day, all day.”
“For months, every bus stop and subway station, people’s pictures of their relatives were plastered all over the city. You couldn’t not see it. Starting that night, for weeks, for the 4 days before it happened, I would look out my window and see it lit up every night. It was beautiful. Then soon after, I would only see the pillars. You’d hear on the radio constantly people calling in saying their loved one’s name, where they worked, where they were last.”
With each passing day, the reality of what she saw and experienced began sinking in more and more. Being all alone in a new city after a terrorist attack wasn’t as hard as processing the sound of the plane overhead, realizing that was the final moments for all of those people on that plane, flying in horror to their deaths just over her head. Sometimes the smallest things stay with us the longest. She remembers walking uptown in a daze before the Towers fell. She recalls some people seemed to be carrying on walking around as if nothing had happened. Other people were huddled around car radios, listening for updates and information. It felt like such a surreal experience, almost like a movie or a dream.
There are millions of stories from that day, millions of lives forever changed. Every story is worth telling. I am thankful that my sister is alive to tell hers and that I can share it today. Thousands are not here to live their stories. We make a place for their names and their memories to live on. We must never forget what happened there that day. These people were killed for hate. We all must learn to value human life more and work toward taking better care of ourselves and the people around us. The only way to create a better future is to learn to work together, to show others what love looks like. I’ll end with some of the greatest words ever spoken:
“Darkness cannot drive out darkness. Only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate. Only love can do that.” – Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.