It’s the weekend before 9/11 and I am coming back home to the city on Amtrak. We pull out of Newark and around that curve and I don’t see the new tower, I don’t see the current landscape at all, all I can see is that burning plume of smoke through my tears.

I took an overnight train Thursday into Friday that week in 2001, a train chock full of heartbroken New Yorkers, all of us desperate to return home. Most of us had been up since Tuesday and crying and/or drinking ever since.I had been drinking vodka nonstop since Chicago. It doesn’t actually dull the pain but it made me feel like I was trying.

We all knew what had happened, we had watched every detail on tv. But this was our home, and we hadn’t been there, and we had this unbearable compulsion to bear witness, to help, to just fucking be there.

We came around the curve, and there was a collective sob. We gasped. A few of us wailed. You couldn’t breathe. All you could see was this hole in the skyline, these giant plumes of smoke rising high in the sky. The train practically tipped over, every single one of us staring at the eastern skyline and what wasn’t there.