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Trip to N.Y.C.
by Carlos Hernandez |
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| My fiancée
Diana and I had planned a trip to New York in September. Right before
our trip the World Trade Center was attacked. I first heard about it on
TV. I was dressed and ready to go to work. I turned on Channel 2 News
and the first thing I saw was Tower One of the WTC on fire. It shocked
me because I was born and raised in NY and this was the second attack
at the WTC in less than 10 years. I didn’t go to work that day; I was
stuck watching all the coverage of the incident on TV. I saw the second
plane hit Tower Two. I started feeling really sad and emotional. I couldn’t
believe that somebody would want to commit suicide, taking people with
them and hurting others. An incident like this comes to show how there
are people in the world that don’t like the U.S. On September 20 we were on an airplane bound for New York City. On a 767 jet that seats over 200 people easy, there were only about 50 people. It felt weird being on a plane. Every moment was intense. I tell you this much now, flying when that incident first happened made me feel really scared. Finally touching down in NY made me feel really happy that we made our destination safe. There were no more worries. Well, maybe one more worry: hoping that my family and friends were all right. Once we got off the plane and got our baggage, my sister came to pick us up and I started asking her a lot of questions about whether my family was OK. She said yes, that everybody was all right. So that made me feel like a huge weight had just been lifted off my shoulders. We got to my sister’s house and dropped off our baggage and the very next night we took a trip together down to the site. It was really sad. I was looking around and I saw a 18-wheeler truck carrying a big piece of steel that once was part of the structure that held the WTC up. At that point, I got very angry and upset over the whole situation. It was still like a shock to me; I couldn’t believe it. At that point, my fiancée tapped me on the shoulder and turned around and pointed to Post-it notes on the wall of a building on Canal Street. We went to see the Post-it notes. Some were prayers, others were memories, and some just poems. Like one poem I read that said, “An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, will leave us all blind and toothless.” Reading that gave us an idea to leave a Post-it note ourselves to the victims and families of the WTC attacks. Being in NY at that moment in time didn’t feel too good. I was sad. Everybody else around me at the moment was sad. Being back home didn’t feel like it used to, didn’t feel like home. It felt like all the life had been sucked out of my city. In the time we spent in NYC, every time we went to a bar at night, it wouldn’t be crowded like usual. Since the tragedy of the WTC, people have been staying home, sheltering themselves from future attacks. For a little while people were scared to come out. And the people that did come out – you could see in their eyes, their faces and their expressions that they were still in shock. I even felt like that. I didn’t know where to turn, what to do, or what to say. Everywhere you turned, everywhere you looked, you’d see a family member of one of the victims hanging up a “wanted” picture and lighting a candle for those people who were missing. As sad as I was, I can’t imagine that pain that the families of the victims were feeling at that time or what the rescue workers were going through, having to go back to the site and experience the horror day after day. I’d like to thank Mayor Giuliani myself for serving two good terms as Mayor of New York and for handling the situation the best way possible. PS: The Post-it message we left for people to see was “Love and peace will prevail.” |
