I was in college, in bed trying to sleep off a late night. A roommate of mine who is a news junkie burst into my room waking me up and talking about some sort of "terrorist attack". I was a bit out of it at the time and didn't really process what was going on. But when I turned on the tv, I'll never forget the sight of smoke pouring out of the towers. It was unmistakeable, we were under attack. Completely blind-sided. An attack on what was probably one of the most beautiful days of the year. One where summer still tries to desperately hang on in the face of fast approaching fall...  

I was with my boyfriend at the time and we rode our bikes down to St. Vincents to give blood or to help. It was a horrifying scene and the street was a huge emergency room.  

Florida. i was in high school, i think my second year. our school was on this program with break times where they would put out boxes of pre-packaged 'healthy brain food' snacks. My kind of spastic English teacher ran across the courtyard saying something about planes crashing, and no one really thought much of it. Then the head of our school got on the megaphone and had us all go to the school theater for an assembly. She explain that it was possibly a terrorist attack, that the facts were not straight yet. School was canceled for the rest of the day. At home I locked myself in the den watching cartoons for I somehow afraid to go into the rest of the house, feeling unsafe with the floor to ceiling glass windows that surrounded the other rooms. Afraid but also angry about the attack on a city that I had always loved and was 3 years away from calling my home.  

I was working in DC at the time, but family and friends thought I was in NYC that day for an interview in the FiDi (that had been cancelled). We had the Today show on, and as Lauer was reporting on the first plane, I remember seeing the second plane hit in the live feed over his shoulder, and it took what seemed to be many minutes before he reported it. Living in DC, everyone I knew was working at or near a potential target. My best buddy was working press at the Pentagon. I actually had to help shepherd people out of the National Arboretum, because it was a "government installation", and so a potential target.