| World Trade Center Here is where it began I wasn�t supposed to die. Not like this. I was supposed to live until I was a hundred and ten and then die peacefully in my sleep. I wasn�t supposed to live until I was only eighteen and die in a raging inferno a hundred and ten stories in the sky. I remember watching the plane slam into the north tower and wondering if anyone had been hurt. I remember wondering if my family knew of this and hoping they wouldn�t worry about me too much. I mean, it was only an accident, right? I hadn�t thought that it was a planned mass-murder attempt. I remember leaving the observation deck and going down to the next level to try to see more. I remember being the only one on that level to notice the other plane coming right for us. I remember bracing myself silently on the floor as the tower shook violently; I had never really been one to scream. I remember the screaming and crying around me as the other tourists started to panic and began rushing for the stairs. I remember running up to the observation deck and warning everyone of the danger some forty stories below us. The people dash by me, carrying confused and frightened children. I remember going back down into the building and ushering those clutched with fear toward the stairs, however much good that would do now since they were probably blocked off with debris. I remember smoke beginning to fill the area and stopping at every floor to check for people. I remember that more windows were smashed the farther down I got, rather from air pressure or something else I didn�t know. I remember reaching the seventy-fifth level when I saw the real reason for the smashed windows. People were jumping. Even at such a higher level than the fire, it quickly snuck up through one of the plane�s wings and doused the area in poisonous smoke like a pyroclastic surge from a volcano. Unable to bear their lungs burning, the people were jumping to escape it. I stop. I kneel on the floor and begin praying, though I wasn�t particularly religious and had never in my life attended an actual sermon. I fully believe in God and now I pray a prayer of my own creation. � Please God . . . save us . . . And if we must die, then . . . then please don�t let anyone suffer . . . I don�t think anyone deserves this . . .� Dimly, I heard ringing. Reaching into my jacket pocket, I open my cellphone. � Hello?� My voice is hollow, emotionless. � Sis? Oh, thank God . . .� My brother. � I�m going to die.� � . . . What?� � I�m in the tower. I�m going to die.� Predictably, he panics. We had always been very close and he had always protected me. Now he couldn�t. � Get out of there! Hurry!� But I don�t care anymore. � No. It�s all right. I�m not afraid.� � Well I am! Get out!� But I sit there. If there had been any escape for me, there wasn�t now. I had certainly waited too long. I hear him calling my name frantically and it brings me back. � Please tell everyone I love them and that I�ll be fine, no matter what may happen.� � I won�t! You�re going to be okay!� He�s crying. It hurts to hear it. He�s supposed to be the strong one. Not me. To spare him any more, I hang up on him and turn the phone off. The tower wavers beneath me like liquid. I know it�s going to come down soon; Daddy�s an architect and taught me all about that stuff. I was planning to follow in his footsteps. Or had been, anyway. I got up and went back upstairs on some odd impulse. All the way up to the observation deck. I stare across the wonderful city of New York and recall seeing the beautiful spires of the twin towers on the horizon when I came in on a bus to visit a friend. I couldn�t imagine one or both of them being gone . . . it was just too strange. I watch a pigeon, a city chicken, float by even at this altitude and notice that this is one of those times where you wish you were a bird and could just open your wings and fly away from everything around you. Up at the very top it was strangely quiet . . . like this was just a hallucination. Oh, how I and so many others wish it was. But the double plumes of smoke were not an illusion. I remember the tower swaying more violently then it ever did before and then suddenly stilling in the mysterious way things do just before something irreversible happens. I remember saying to myself, � This is it.� I remember feeling tiny jerks as the floors collapse on each other. I remember jumping into the air at the last second and watching the deck fall away from me. I remember spreading my arms in a pitiful imitation of wings and closing my eyes, letting my head roll back. I remember the incredible feeling of momentary weightlessness and allowing myself to believe, for that fraction of a second, that I was a bird. I remember falling, falling, falling . . . It seemed to go on forever. Then my limp body connected with the concrete below me and the eternal blackness of death swallowed me, drawing me into the warm shelter of its cloak. <--Back Continue--> |