Whenever I think about that day, the first thing I always remember is fire. 

 Fire, deep fire, glowering, sputtering, hissing throughout the night and the long days to follow; fire, and choking smoke, thick and heavy enough to form an impenetrable barrier, the city skyline lost behind boiling black clouds.

 That morning started out the way most mornings had started out for me, then.  I woke up, fed the cats, missed my husband, who was stationed overseas; a feeling of unease dogged me, that morning, but I shook off the desire to crawl back under the covers. I wasn’t actually sick; my desire to call in sick was the product of depression and ambivalence, qualities I know better than to indulge.  I went to work anyway. 

 Sometime after 9 a.m., I stood up in my office and declared, “My friend is an asshole.” My coworker’s head popped over the partition in curiosity. “He just told me,” I continued, “That a plane drove into the World Trade Center in New York. What kind of a joke is that?” This friend was continually tricking me into believing ridiculous things, but this one was simply too incredible for my gullible self to accept.  It couldn’t have happened. Could it?

 The room broke out in a flurry of typing as we dove for our favorite search engines and started surfing news sites.  The silence, as we each located articles confirming our fears, was replaced by hysteria.  Ten minutes later, the entire office gathered in the executive conference room in front of the flatscreen TV.  Our mouths covered by horrified hands, we watched the two towers fall, heard the Pentagon had been hit.  Many people started to cry; I couldn’t begin to.  A dull ache was all I could manage.  My father in law worked at the Pentagon.  Was he alive? I lived across from the Pentagon. Was my apartment gone, too?

 I couldn’t go home.  DC was thrown to chaos; the streets clogged, the metro stopped, people running and crying and screaming everywhere.  I walked, instead, from Metro Center all the way to Union Station to hole up in a friend’s house until the city calmed enough that I could go home, provided I had a home to go to.  I sat with my phone on continual redial, trying to call my family, my husband’s family, my husband.  There was so much we didn’t know, and so much we couldn’t bring ourselves to believe. 

 No one really knew what was going on, but my husband knew even less. Stationed in Japan, they had been awakened in the early hours of the morning to stand post, told only that the US was under attack, that New York and the Pentagon had been bombed.  Frozen in fear, he wondered if I was still alive. If there had been a bomb, our apartment would have been in the blast zone.

 The reality was bad enough.  Around 6 pm I finally made my way home; they had just reopened the Pentagon City station.  Fear and shock were written large on every face.  There were no smiles, no laughter anywhere. 

At my front door I was questioned by an FBI agent. They’d shut down our roof and were questioning everyone in the building to see if anyone had seen the plane actually hit.  I shook my head wearily, answered his questions as quickly as I could, and headed upstairs. 

 The windows in that apartment were huge, nearly floor-to-ceiling affairs. I stood at them, staring out at the confusion and chaos going on at the burning Pentagon, staring at the heart of the destruction, and for the first time I thought to myself, maybe this isn’t the safest place to be living. Everything I did in the next few days was dominated by the sight outside my window.  Cooking, using the computer, watching TV, sleeping; everything I did was overshadowed by the sight lurking out of the corner of my eye.  I played music, violent, loud music, to drown out the sirens that were always going off for the next few days.  Climbing clumsily up onto the narrow ledge, I draped blankets over the windows with a cold, controlled fury, so that I wouldn’t have to see the sharp redness of fire stabbing through the vertical blinds, so I wouldn’t have to wonder if those bright embers that wouldn’t go out were the remains of someone’s father, mother, friend.  It was too much to look at, all day long; my heart was already too heavy.

 All of our hearts were.