Yesterday, I came into the city on the 7:26 am train out of my hometown, Cold Spring - a small town on the Hudson Line a little over an hour from Grand Central Terminal. I'd been staying there for the weekend. I was leaving a bit earlier than I had originally planned because I'd set up plans to meet one of my best friends for an early matinee - otherwise I would have likely left around 4 in the afternoon. My train arrived at Grand Central at about 8:25... I got on the F train and made my way over to the York stop, which is a handful of blocks from where I've been living in Brooklyn, right on the water in DUMBO, directly across the river from the World Trade Center. When I came up from the subway stop, I immediately saw the smoke... my initial reaction was that I thought that the Watchtower building was on fire. Once I made it further down York street, the WTC came into full view, and I knew right away from the twin blasts that this was no accident. Apparently, I had missed the second plane by only a few minutes.

For the rest of the day, I watched along with my roommates from our windows... we witnessed with our own eyes the buildings collapse to the ground. I don't think I will ever be able to forget how that felt - when that first tower fell, I swear that I could feel the lives of those people disappearing... Most of the day, I just felt hollow and empty, and frightened about how the world was going to change. I had headaches throughout the day, I'm fairly certain it was from inhaling the air around us, the smoke, the ashes of the dead. Occasionally we would get a draft that smelled like burnt tire rubber, when I went over to the Promenade around sundown, the scent was even more prominent there.

It was not until much later in the day did I start to feel a strong paranoia about potential follow-up attacks. Ever since then, I can't shake the fear... I'm slightly embarassed by the fact that out of the 10 people I'm staying with, I'm probably the most paranoid and nervous at the moment. One of my roommates grew up in Belgrade, and she's been trying her best to calm me down, and help me cope with this. Her reaction to this is especially interesting to me, as she is profoundly disturbed that she left her country to avoid this sort of thing, and here it is, it has followed her over... at the same time, she feels a sense of vindication for what the US has done in her country. I can't say I blame her, honestly.

I am a very lucky man in that no one I know was killed yesterday. In fact, it was a very close call - my uncle works in the WTC, and had arrived for work yesterday at 8 am, and had left the building to get breakfast when the attack happened. I can't tell you how happy I am that he has survived - he is a good, honest, kind man, and his two young children and my aunt deserve to have him in their life. I am sure that can be said of many, many, many people who died yesterday, it is only by the grace of God that my family is so blessed to have him still, I suppose. He and his family were already devout Christians - I am sure this has only strengthened their faith.

I've made a decision that I will be going back home to Cold Spring today. I am hoping that this will be a safe trip home, that the intense security in the city now will allow me safe passage out of the city and back to the place where I grew up. I don't even know how rational it is to fear more attacks, and being in Brooklyn is obviously as safe a place as there can be here in the city - I mostly just want to get away from here, I don't want to have to look at when I pass the windows, I don't want to have to smell it when I walk out the door. I want to be with my family, I want to be with my friends who are there. I want to be in a place where all there is is trees and little houses, out of sight and out of mind.

I hope to God that this is the end of the attacks on US soil for now, maybe even forever. That may be a naive thought, that may be proven very untrue. This could very easily be the beginning of the end. I hope and pray that this all reaches an end soon, with a minimum of blood shed on all sides... that we can all go back to the illusion of safety that we had yesterday before the planes hit. I wonder if that illusion will ever come back to us.

Matthew Perpetua [Flux = Rad]

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