I remember thinking it was a small plane. Out of control. A pilot’s mistake.

I remember the assistant on the other end of phone call, speaking to me in my hotel room in Houston, being the one who told me: “Nina, I don’t know if the news has hit you there in Texas — a plane just hit the World Trade Center.” As if I were on another planet, cut off from everything.

I’d been scheduling a meeting. Like everyone else, without the visuals, that was the story I told myself — a small aircraft had clipped a large building. I remember turning on CNN. I remember Aaron Brown, telegraphing shock in his eyes, delivering the news one sentence ahead of understanding it. Something very wrong was in motion, propelling us into a world we could never have contemplated.

I remember looking out the window of my high floor at the Four Seasons and seeing guests gathered around the pool. This was before the iPhone. Not everyone was tethered to the news yet — that, like so much else, only came after. I remember wondering how they could sit there, oblivious, while the great divide between before and after was already reformulating our truth.

I remember hesitating over the elevator or the stairs, then taking the elevator down to a rapidly growing crowd of strangers — isolated business travelers, suddenly unable to bear being alone. I remember standing in that lobby, watching the second plane hit on the large screen above the bar, and thinking, for one confused second, that it was the same building from another angle — before the whoosh of collective breath around me confirmed that it was not, that a second tower had been hit. And then, just moments later, I remember seeing the tower crumble, evaporating into smithereens, completely disappearing into the void— not understanding what I was seeing, thinking,........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)