September 11th..bringing back thoughts

It's funny how certain events in your life you just manage to block until something pushes them back into the spotlight...Septmeber 11th is one of those for me. I had just moved to NYC exactly a month before, amist alot of heartache and mixed emotions from my family. Like you hear from many that expereinced it first hand you somehow seem to remeber every vivid detail like a video playing back in your head. It was a particularly gorgeous day, bright and sunny, crisp and nice on the skin with the slight tinge that autum was approaching. It's funny I remember being on the R train when the first plane hit the world trade center and was slightly annoyed at the fact that the trains had stopped for about 10 minutes and I was going to be late to physics ( which I particularly didnt like to begin with). I made it to class and had just sat down for 10 minutes when almost in a symphonic unison cell phones started ringing and gasp of horror were being heard so clearly that my professor stopped to class to answer her own cell phone that was continuously ringing. She broke the news to our lecture hall in tears and dismissed our class and sent us of to seek refuge. I went up to my lab on the 9th floor of Hunter College (located at 68th st & lex) to figure out what in the world was going on and there it was that my eyes witnessed the horror that was unfolding as the first building collapsed. Like many that morning I didnt know what to do, scream, cry, runaway...OMG what is happening, you are never prepared to face an event of this magnitude. My cell phone no longer worked, calls were impossible to get through. I finally got through to my mother in florida after numerous tries and felt her panic, asking if I wanted her to come get me. A group of us finally decided to evacuate the city and make the long trek on foot back to the borough of queens over the 59th street/triborough bridge which had been shut down to traffic and become a pedestrain escape route. Half way across the bridge I remeber pausing to look back at the scene as to assure myself that I was really seeing nad experiencing what I thought I was. It was only seconds later, as a gasp of tears and disbelief swept the hundreds of other people standing all around me that I saw the second building collapsed as did my heart !!!
I made it home about 3 hours later and it was only after the shell shock of what I had actually witnessed and just lived through set in that I realized that my life could have turned out completely different that day, had the timing been just a little different on the events that day. On that fateful morning of Sept 11th I was actually scheduled to attend an interview for a biology fellowship at the offices of the Research Foundation of the City University of New York  at 11 am whose central office was directly across from the Tower 1 of the world trade center
Sept 11th will forever live in my mind as a day whose memory will persit in the back of my mind because it is just too much emotion to handle. On a day like today, 8 years in the future from the atrocities of that day, my heart still cries when I see the images of those brave and fearless angles of God that thought of others before themselves and gave their lives to save that of a stranger. I know that they sit in the glory of heaven now and I only pray that they have no memory or recollection of that day but can finally rest in complete peace.