I was woken by my girlfriend Heather, who was crying.

"I'm sorry to wake you," she said. "But...."

I had told her long ago that, unless she wanted to deal with a very grumpy person, she should never wake me before 9am, unless the building was on fire or something."

She woke me at 7am. A building was on fire. In New York.

As I rubbed the sleep out of my eyes, staring into CNN, my sleep-addled brain was fighting with what my eyes were seeing. It couldn't be. It just couldn't.

Heather pointed at the North Tower, the one left standing, and said, "Isn't that where Jenny used to work?"

My sister, Jenny. She worked in the World Trade Center, right there where Heather's finger was smudging the television screen. Two months ago she quit and moved to LA. But two months earlier....

I had to sit down, then. I had to look away. At the wall, at anything, to keep from breaking down.

Then I had to call my sister, safe in LA.

Derek M. Powazek

I thought it was a replay of the '93 bombing when I woke up. I thought NPR was doing a retrospective. But then I realized it was going on. I padded into the living room, turned on the tv, and watched the towers crumble.

All of my New York friends are alive.

Two of my girlfriend's co-workers were on the flight from Boston. She hasn't talked to me or anyone else about it. I'm missing her most of all.

Adam Rakunas {rak@giro.org}

The clock radio went off Tuesday morning blaring the news that the WTC had been hit by two airplanes, and the Pentagon shortly thereafter. I almost hit the snooze button. I was still groggy, and the first thought to enter my mind was of Orson Welles. They can't be serious, I thought.

I turned on the television in time to watch the first tower crumble, and to see the footage of the second plane crash over and over and over.

C. Davis {hey_you@preterit.com}

I work in isolation so I didn't find out about the tragedies unfolding until a few hours after they'd occured. After I was told what happened I ran down stairs to see it for myself. I stood in front of the television with a few others in shock and horror. My legs began to tremble and I had to sit down. I simply could not wrap my head around what had happened.

I had to get some fresh air and call my family. I called my wife first and then, I'm not ashamed to say, my mommy. As I stood on the parking ramp in mid-Michigan, in the sky I could see jetstreams that suddenly changed course and feared that they too might be headed for some unknown target (of course later realized they were being re-directed to land immediately).

From that moment on, I knew my daughter would grow up in an America that was not untouchable. None of us were safe anymore. And I began to cry, from sorrow, freight, and anger. My thoughts went out to all those I know around the country via the internet and I hoped they were all okay. I thought about the many emails I shared with Jenny a few months ago from the twelveth floor of the World Trade Center and how I was SO glad she didn't get the part in Mamma Mia!

Since then I've cried even more. But not from grief, but rather from the outpouring of humanity. And also that my daughter will inherit an even better America which I look forward to living in.

God bless us all!

Michael D. Thomas {thomasmd@mac.com}

"Turn on your television. Any station. It doesn't matter."

(Insert the sound of the beep that comes between your voicemail messages here.)

"I love you, honey. Call me to let me know you're okay."

Bad messages to find. Those were the ones on my cell phone on Tuesday morning. The first one came from a friend and the second one came from my mother.

I heard my phone go off twice in the early a.m. here in Los Angeles. The people close to me know to ring the cell phone now on certain mornings/nights...the ones that I usually sleep at my boyfriend's place. I admit I was pissed when I heard it go off not once but TWICE before my recognized awake time.

I picked up my messages after my boyfriend left that morning and flipped on the TV. There was that first image - one of the WTC towers on fire. I've done visual effects work, enhancing the images of destruction - fires, explosions, whatever you like - for film and television using all kinds of compositing and painting software so I found myself looking at this image like it was a fake at first. In my sub-functional, early morning state, I was asking myself if those flames and that smoke looked real enough to me.

They did.

As I was silently deciding this footage - whatever it was - looked convincing enough the second plane came into the picture and went through the other tower. This didn't just look real. It was real. And I returned my calls.

My friend Max was trying to get through to his sister in N.Y. My mother - who survived Nazi-occupied Germany as a little girl - was in tears. She told me she came to this country so she would never have to see the same images - things like planes bombing out the entire East German cities of Leipzig and Dresden - she used to see growning up. I realized, while I listened to each of them talk, I was watching the most significant news story of my lifetime.

"We've always needed God in this country, but we need him now especially," Rev. Billy Graham said today (Friday, September 14) during the services at the National Cathedral.

Normally, I'd rip that kind of statement apart. I'm an agnostic. I make my way through this life noodling around with issues of faith, hope and forever. It's my way to doubt all of it. But today, after watching dazed and sobbing rescue workers remove rubble and body parts from Ground Zero for days, I needed to hear something about faith, something about hope...and to entertain the idea of a peaceful and painless forever for those who suffered. The collapse of the two WTC towers pulled us all into a foxhole and there simply are no agnostics or atheists in foxholes.

Last night as I was falling asleep, my boyfriend and I were talking about feeling for those who'd suffered horrible, unimaginable losses and feeling the strange, self-conscious grace of being relatively unhurt - neither one of us lost anyone we know - by what happened when he told me he wanted me to start pulling my car into the garage when I stayed at his place.

"I worry about you parking on the street," he said.

Normally I'd shrug that kind of thing off as a worry about nothing but I paused.

"I'll pull into the garage behind you on Saturday," I said and fell asleep.

Karen {Oddsock@aol.com}

I'm 21 yrs. old. On monday i was worrying about what classes to take, what i'd do when i graduate. but on tuesday, none of that mattered.

I knew my family was ok, i'd emailed them, but for two days i couldn't reach my parents in dc by phone. (and my sister in ny) when i finally did, nothing felt better than to hear their voices. but my mother told me of how she was just signing into work, when a co-worker came running out saying, "i just saw a plane hit the pentagon! i'm leaving!" and running out. my mother stared on in astonishment before deciding to leave herself.

i'm feeling lost and confused right now. i think we all are. I feel like i should be doing something, but as the days move on and i head back to school i feel like something's fading. i look at the faces of some of the kids who say, "well maybe if i lived in ny or dc it would affect me....but i don't" and i wonder if they are in denial? or if they just don't care.....i don't know.

i have to do something, not just twiddle my thumbs, not just go back to class...but i don't know what? a week ago i was some dumb kid who lived this idealic sheltered life. it's hard to think that i'm that same person now.

cat {sciencex@yahoo.com}

It was a very normal day at work. I sat down to a meeting at 9 in the training room, and someone mentioned very offhandedly that he heard a plane might have crashed into a building in NY. I only sort of half believed him. The meeting started, and it didn't cross my mind.

Towards the end of the meeting, I did a little calculation. I had another meeting at 10. If I left 5 minutes early, I would have time to go down for a coffee and come back up for the next meeting. So I went downstairs, poured my coffee and made it back up in good time.

The room I had been in - my 9 o'clock - was full. 40 people there, watching a 10 foot TV screen. I just saw a lot of smoke, and figured that all that smoke must be obscuring the second tower. Look, I said to myself, there's one, the other should be just there. Behind that smoke.

It didn't sink in right away. I said hey, this will be on TV all day. Let's have our meeting. So we went next door, and blah blah blah about I don't quite remember what now. It was starting to sink in.

My brother works on Wall St. His wife is a flight attendant. My girlfriend, who I'd dropped off at the airport early Monday morning, was the press agent for a month-long show based at the World Financial Center.

Hmmm.

I was shaking, physically shaking when I left the meeting. I went to my desk and just packed up. I went home.

I have a very good defense mechanism in times of tragedy like this: I'm a natural born theorist. I can analyze things to death - which gives me an artificial distance from some events. It gets me through the day.

But my brother was within a half mile of this inferno. My girlfriend was next door. And for all I knew, my sister in law had just plowed into a fucking building. It defied thought. It defied speech. It defied every coping mechanism I knew.

I was lucky, before too long. I heard that everyone I love had been spared by 3 that afternoon, and two of them much earlier.

I've been trying to think since, and more importantly to write it down. But the experience is still defying my attempts. I can't think of much beyond the idea that my brother walked over 100 blocks home not knowing if his wife was dead or alive.

Luckily, she is alive. Would that thousands of others could say the same.

Michael {mboyle@mikel.org}

I was on my way to the Mall of America for a job interview. I didn't turn on the television that morning. I woke up late and was rushing to catch the bus. As I waited on the corner for the 5 to come down from the 56th street hill, I thought about what a gorgeous day it was going to be. I looked down at my watch.... 10:14. The bus was late. The 5 is never late. I thought to myself that something must be happening at the transit station. I was going to be 10 minutes late for my interview. "Damnit! I need this job. I have to start saving money for college because I can't work for 8 dollars an hour for the rest of my life. Everyone knows money is a necessary evil today. 8 dollars an hour won't pay for medical school, rent, food, and the increasing gas prices. I wonder how those stocks my family invested in were doing?" I wondered how I was going to make a good impression today.

I had seen the woman before. She was a little on the "disturbed" side. She always carried 5 or 6 plastics bags with her. Filled with papers and objects I couldn't determine without making myself look like an ass by staring at her. She told the bus driver as she got on, that the sign was wrong on the front of the bus. "This won't go to the Mall," she protested. "The Mall is closed today. I heard it on the radio." I thought, "What now? Another fight? A police chase? Some stupid high school kids calling in a fake bomb threat?" It grew to be customary for the place at the height of commercialism, which we so lovingly refer to as "The place for fun in your life", to receive all sorts of negative publicity. It was no surprise to hear what the older woman was ranting and raving about. I disregarded her message. That was a mistake.

I saw them from almost a mile away. The police and squad cars. The news personnel and their towering antennas attached to the all to familiar white vans with the local station number painted vividly on the side. The buses weren't going into the regualr underground stop. They turned to the left of the Mall, across the street in an almost deserted parking lot. We were told to exit the bus immediately whether or not this was our stop. I wasn't sure what to do. I took a seat on the grassy knoll on the west side of the lot and waited. I heard a man talking on his cell phone to a colleague about how the buses were running late because of some hysteria downtown. Then a young Middle Eastern girl, maybe 17, came up to me and told me. She worked at the Mall and said that the it had been evacuated. She first told me that New York City and the White House had been bombed and referred to it as the "Gray House". She said the Mall of America would be a great place to consider if you wanted to kill a lot of people. "Look... It has 'America' in big white letters on all sides of it!" She also said America had it coming. I felt like slapping her although there was some truth to those words. We spoke briefly and although her lack of information confused me later, I was tense. I couldn't think straight and I just wanted to go home. I had friends in Manhattan that were more my family than my biological family. I took the next bus back to my house, went downstairs and found my panic stricken mother tuned into an emotion heightened Peter Jennings. The United States was under attack. The Petagon and the World Trade Center towers were destroyed by hijacked commercial flights. The rest, sadly, is history.

I was at home, in Minneapolis, far away from the initial horror. My close friend, I later found out, lost her boyfriend in the blast for 2 days. He is paralyzed in his right leg, but alive. He is a dear friend of mine. A different friend who gave me a place to live while I lived in NY, was blinded by debris flying through a window. He worked next door to Tower 2. God knows who else I know over there is still missing. God knows how many families will never find their loved ones.

I can't believe I didn't turn on my television Tuesday morning. I was too concerned with making money, being angry at the transit system for it's lateness, with an interview, which in the grand scheme of it all...means absolutely nothing. While I was being a selfish, money consumed American, my friends violently, unethically and barbarically found themselves in hell on earth. God Bless you all who have been directly affected and to the ones we lost. May God have mercy on those bastards..... I know we won't.

Tabitha {Taiha@invisiblehands.net}

A Morning at School

I'm so far away, in Waco, Texas, you would think the distance would have made me feel safe. I teach at a school across the street from an airport the President uses occasionally because it is convenient to his home in Crawford. Last term I marched an entire class across the street and took our picture in front of Air Force One.

We heard the news and someone found a television set, one we use for videos in the classroom, and we watched, stunned. The horrifying updates, one after another, each more shocking than the last. The evil second plane. The number of hijacked planes, the Pentagon.

I don't know what time it was when we got the call. But when it came, President Bush was in the air, on his way from Florida to an unstated destination. There was still one hijacked plane unaccounted for. And we got the call to close campus and send everyone home, right now.

I leaped to the conclusion that Bush was headed to land right across the street, and that he, and by extension us, were another potential target of that still-missing fourth hijacked jet.

I locked lab doors as fast as my shaking hands could get the keys into them, incredulous and furious that my body would not obey my mind's commands! I scanned the too-empty sky on my way out of the parking lot.

We will never have that innocent complacent feeling of public personal safety again, any of us.

Today, (Friday, Sept 14) I saw the dawning realization in my students' eyes of what phrases like "Declaration of War", "50,000 reservists", "lengthy campaign", and "sacrifice" might mean in their healthy, young adult lives. And it breaks my heart.

Sylvia Harrington {harringtondesign@earthlink.net}

I was looking forward to calm September 11s. September 11, 1973, is a day that forever scarred my country of origin, Chile; September 11, 2001, is a day that forever scarred the country I currently call home.

I have been driving around aimlessly; I have been roaming the web, looking at every journal site I've ever heard of, hoping to read something that might make it seem a little less unreal, less grotesque, less perverse.

I have found nothing.

I have been driving around aimlessly. A woman almost merged onto me today; I took it all out on her and flipped her off, as if that would fix this void I feel inside me.

She didn't see me.

I have found nothing.

Anesly {anesly@deadletter.org}