Outside the hospital dozens of people were just staring and crying. I didn’t understand what was going on. So my mother told us that the nurses standing next to the gurneys were waiting for survivors – but they never came.
That afternoon we went to the playground across from our apartment to meet our friends. The dark, dense cloud of smoke was floating away from Manhattan to Brooklyn. I remember hearing parents saying: “Should we stay? Should we go? Are we hurting our kids?” My parents decided to stay.
The smell of smoke was in the air for over a month. My sister and I returned to school after several weeks when the streets downtown reopened to cars and buses. I don’t remember discussing what happened with my teachers. Some of my classmates and friends lost family members – it was very sombre.
On my block there was a small Egyptian restaurant. The owners were frightened by the rise in Islamophobic hate crimes. They hung huge American flags all over the windows. They kept repeating: “Why are they picking on us Egyptians – we had nothing to do with this.” Middle Eastern taxi drivers hung American flags from their rear view mirrors.
We were the lucky ones. We didn’t face the state-sanctioned surveillance of Muslim communities across the city that had covertly infiltrated local mosques.
Every year in school we would have a ‘moment of silence’. Some of my friends would always stay silent longer than others. In 2002 the city started to commemorate 9/11 by shining two massive lights into the sky. It’s beautiful, and serves as a nostalgic memorial for a past I don’t remember.
For my family, life moved on. But for others, the pain will never end. My close friend's father suffers from debilitating lung and heart disease. He was part of the search and rescue team. He’s one of the more than 13,200 first responders and survivors suffering from chronic respiratory diseases from searching the rubble.
I’m one of the privileged ones. I remember seeing images of distant wars on TV. When I got older, I encountered the militarised police force. Sometimes I would be randomly stopped on my way to high school by police searching for bombs in my bookbag.
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