I had been living in New York City for a short time when I learned that sirens have different voices.
The city had been teaching me its sounds for weeks — cab horns, the low shudder of the subway, and the ordinary emergencies that move through a city the way weather moves, arriving and passing. I had learned to sleep through them. But on the morning of September 11, 2001, the sirens outside my window did not pass. They stacked, one upon another, and something in my body, something below thought, knew this was different.
My phone rang. It was my Dad, calling from Texas.
“I’m glad you’re okay,” he said. “Do you know what’s going on?”
I told him I didn’t. I sat up in bed while the sirens continued outside.
“Two planes have flown into the World Trade Center towers. They thought the first was an accident, but now they’re saying it’s an attack.”
I told him I was supposed to have had a meeting near there that morning, but I was okay. I stood and went to the window. Below, Lexington Avenue was a river of emergency vehicles moving south, their lights sweeping the building faces, the sirens swallowed into the larger sound of all of them together. I watched them go and felt the specific strangeness of watching people run toward a thing you cannot yet see.
“We love you,” my Dad said. “Keep in touch with us today.”
I told him I would. Then we hung up.
I had come to Manhattan the day after I finished my final exams at Baylor, at the end of my sophomore year back in May. Modeling scouts had approached me at the restaurant where I was working, and I told them I had no interest in the world of fashion. They came back an hour later and told me that I could travel the world on someone else’s dime, and the word travel — not glamor, not money, not New York, but the idea that the world might unlock for me — was the catalyst. Within weeks, I had signed with Wilhelmina, the top modeling agency in the world at the time, finished my exams, and boarded a flight to a city I had never seen.
A limousine met me at the airport and took me to the agency at 23rd Street and Park Avenue. I got lost on the subway that first afternoon and missed a meeting with Calvin Klein. That night, I called my parents and told my Dad that I wasn’t sure I cared to stay in the city. “I don’t need this place,” I said.
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He encouraged me to give it a shot. So I did. At 20 years old, I slowly began to learn the rhythms of Manhattan and the world beyond.
The work took me places I had never imagined from a small town in Texas—runway shows and photo shoots in London, Milan, Nairobi, Paris, Miami, San Jose, modeling for clients like Calvin Klein, Ralph Lauren, and Giorgio Armani. I walked beside supermodels whose faces were on the sides of buildings and had been in magazines that had arrived in my mailbox during high school just a few years before. None of it felt like my real life. What I did know was that I wanted to be a writer and that all of this was part of my education. While many of my peers spent their nights in clubs and their money on cocaine, I spent mine in bookstores and at my desk, buying screenplays off street vendors to understand how stories work on the page, writing late into the night in apartments and hotel rooms all over the world. I observed. I absorbed. I was 20 years old, and the world, as promised, had begun to open. I was simply trying to be worthy of what it was trying to teach me.
Then there was September 11th.
Having just woken up and without stopping to put on shirts, my roommates and I ran up the emergency staircase of our apartment building to the roof.
We came through the door into a clear blue morning. A few residents were already there, all of them looking south. Twenty blocks away, the twin towers rose above the skyline, trailing dark columns of smoke against the blue. The moon was visible in the sky that morning, and an American flag was posted on the roof of the building across Lexington Avenue. I held the image in my mind at arm’s length, the way you hold something you don’t yet have a container for. It looked like an elaborate film set, like it was happening somewhere else. But there was no frame to step outside of. We were simply in it.
I had only recently begun to use a cell phone, and we soon realized that we no longer had cell service. So I was surprised when my phone rang. It was a dear childhood friend calling from Texas to make sure I was alive. I told her I was and that I was surprised her call had gotten through. I could picture her back home, surrounded by familiar streets, quiet houses, and the unhurried landscape of the life I had come from while I stood on this roof in the smoke-tinged morning. The distance between those two worlds felt immeasurable.
Not long after, a messenger who lived in our building appeared on the roof. He had been getting out of an elevator in one of the towers when the first plane struck. He was still processing what he had escaped. People downtown, he said, were already afraid the buildings might fall.
We all looked at the towers. The columns of smoke had grown darker and thicker. It seemed an impossible idea. Those towers were a fixed thing, as permanent as the island itself. But a low, formless dread was already moving through all of us. None of us spoke.
I had brought a disposable camera up with me and began taking photographs. At some point, I handed it to a roommate and asked him to take one of me with the burning skyline behind me. For twenty-five years, I have not been sure what to make of that impulse. It was not callousness. It was something closer to what my maternal grandfather had taught me without meaning to, with all his stories about being in the Navy at Iwo Jima in World War II. It was that ordinary mornings can become the kind that future generations later study, and some part of me already knew we were standing inside one. I wanted to show my family that I was there, inside history, to make some evidence that this was happening to me and not merely near me. Whether lifting a camera to your eye in such a moment is witness or vanity — whether those things are ever fully separable — I have returned to that question many times. What I have come to believe is that the young man who stood before that camera was doing the only thing he knew how to do with something too large to hold. He did not yet realize the breadth of what was happening or what 9/11 would become. He simply knew that something terrible was occurring in his country, and he took the photo to show family and friends that he was there in whatever it was.
It even looks like I’m slightly smiling, which was in stark contrast to how I was feeling. It is a peculiar instinct to begin a smile when someone counts down to take a photo. But I was heartbroken by what was happening in that moment and have remained haunted by it ever since.
Not long after the photograph was taken, the first tower fell.
The sound that rose from the people around me is not one I have heard since. It was not a scream. It was something that preceded screaming. It was involuntary, collective, desperate — a sound torn from the body before the mind could shape it. We were watching thousands of people die in the time it takes to exhale. People who had kissed someone goodbye that morning. People who had expected the day to continue in the ordinary way days continue. Before any of us had found a single word, the second tower fell. The skyline I had only just begun to learn was changed in a way nothing would ever undo.
We came down from the roof and put on our shirts and went out into the city, which no longer felt like the one I had been learning to love.
The streets held a silence that Manhattan almost never produces — not quiet, exactly, but a suspension, as if the city itself was trying to locate itself inside something for which it had no prior map. Outside our building, a news crew stopped us, and I heard myself say that we were living through a day that our children and grandchildren would study in school. It was the kind of thing you say when the real feeling has not yet arrived.
We stopped by the agency, as if hoping for answers, but no one knew what was going on. They only knew that Fashion Week was over and told us all to find a way to get back home. With our day’s meetings cancelled, my roommates and I decided to walk through the city and see what was happening.
One of my roommates — a fellow model with expensive habits and a talent for bad timing — bought an armload of American flag bandanas in Chinatown and tried to sell them on the steps of Union Square. Two women noticed what he was doing and approached him. They didn’t raise their voices. They told him quietly what they thought of it, that he was taking advantage of tragedy, and he stood there listening. Then he started giving the bandanas away for free. People gathered on those steps not to buy anything, not to say anything useful, but simply to be near other people. Grief does that. It drives you out of yourself and toward the nearest body.
We walked south through the dusty streets that looked straight out of a dystopian film, eventually making our way to ground zero. There, we joined others who were loading water bottles onto Jeeps. There was nothing heroic about it. There was simply a need and hands nearby to meet it, which, as I would come to understand, was the entire story of that afternoon. While we were working, a third large building near the site—what I later learned was the 7 World Trade Center — collapsed, and we decided to head back uptown.
By the time I walked down Park Avenue that afternoon to drop off my disposable camera at the photo lab, the walls were covered with flyers. Faces appeared everywhere pressed to brick, to glass, to any surface that would hold them. Families had printed photographs and phone numbers in the hours since the towers fell and fixed them wherever people might pass. Each face had a name. Many had ages. Some had the names of children who were waiting at home.
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I have returned to those flyers in my memory more often than to almost anything else that day — more than the towers falling, more than the smoke, more than the soldiers who appeared on the street corners by nightfall. What arrests me still is the specific grammar of that act. The towers had fallen in one enormous spectacle, legible at the scale of news and history. But the flyers refused that scale. They pressed forward from the catastrophe one face at a time, insisting that what had been lost was not a number but a person. Each flyer said this person, with this face, who was last seen here, who is being looked for by these specific hands that made this flyer and pressed it to this wall.
Grief, I understood that afternoon, does not grieve in the aggregate. It finds its particular object or it finds nothing at all.
By nightfall, the air was thick with ash and the city smelled like a campfire, though I tried not to think about what was burning. Military vehicles lined the avenue outside my apartment window as far as I could count in both directions. Soldiers stood on every street corner handing out paper masks, the kind I had worn back home while mowing the lawn. I kept mine for years afterward, folded in a drawer, the way you keep a thing that has no use anymore but cannot be thrown away.
The next night, a church youth group from Texas called while I stood outside in the dusty air near a soldier with a rifle. I could picture those teenagers gathered somewhere warm and familiar, surrounded by the unhurried streets of a place the day had not touched. They asked what it was like. I was 20 years old, standing in the dark and the ash, having witnessed the center of the world come down in a single hour. I had no answer to give them, and I told them so. It was the most honest thing I said that day.
On 9/11 and in the days that followed, I watched something I have since come to hold as a kind of testimony — not about the goodness of people in the abstract, but about what becomes possible in them when the usual reasons not to be good are briefly swept away. A man held a stranger while she wept outside a pharmacy on Lexington. Two men who had clearly never spoken — one in a construction vest, one in a suit — sat side by side on a stoop sharing a water bottle, not talking, just sitting. I saw Christians, Muslims, atheists, Hindus, Black people, white people, rich people, poor people, and everyone in between help each other while grieving together. In the ash and the silence, the distances that ordinary life maintains between people had not been argued away. They had simply, briefly, ceased to matter. The threshold for turning toward another person in their suffering had dropped to almost nothing. No prior agreement. No resolved grievance. Only a person, and another person, and the space between them briefly closed.
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I have been cautious over the years about what to make of this. Catastrophe does not redeem itself by briefly suspending our divisions. The dead do not become less dead because the living were briefly kinder. And the openness of those days did not hold — could not hold, perhaps — against the return of ordinary life with its ordinary frictions. I know all of this. And yet, what I witnessed has continued to press on something I cannot fully name. Some prior assumption, perhaps, that compassion at scale requires the right conditions first, that people need common ground before they can stand on it together. Those streets suggested otherwise. Not as consolation. Not as a lesson catastrophe was trying to teach. But as a witnessed fact, that the threshold for turning toward another person in their suffering can be much lower than we habitually allow ourselves to believe. Sometimes proximity is enough. Sometimes need is enough.
A week later, I went home to Texas. But I was different. Quieter. Moving through my days as if slightly outside them, processing something I didn’t yet have a name for. My mom, watching me move through the house like a man looking for a room he couldn’t find, asked me if I had been doing drugs while living in New York. I have never tried drugs in my life. I was simply a 20-year-old who had stood in the middle of something enormous and was still waiting for himself to catch up to what he had witnessed.
I returned to Manhattan a month later. A plume of smoke still rose from ground zero. The following year, my new apartment was right beside it, and every morning I looked out the window down into the open wound of the site — the cranes, the mud, the massive and patient work of what comes after. I came to know that view the way you come to know the face of someone you love: involuntarily, completely, in all its daily changes and its essential sameness. The towers were gone, and the sky where they had been was a presence in itself. An absence with edges.
For years after, the smell of a campfire transported me back to that day without warning. I could be sitting with friends around a campfire in a Texas field, in the warmth of an ordinary night, and suddenly I was back in that specific dark and ash, back in the smell of a city that had burned in a way no city should. The smell had lodged somewhere below memory, in the part of the body that doesn’t wait for the mind’s permission.
But the body keeps living, and living keeps adding to what the body knows.
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Over the years, I sat around more campfires — in fields, in forests, in mountains, on back porches, beside people I loved, in the warmth of nights that needed no name. Slowly, the smell became larger than one specific memory. Grief, I found, can coexist with other tenants. The smell of woodsmoke is still, sometimes, September. It is also every fire I have sat beside since — every friend’s voice I have heard across the light, every child I have watched fall asleep on a blanket near the embers, every ordinary night that asked nothing of me except to be present in it. I have come to think this is one of the quiet dignities of surviving. It’s not that the wound closes, but that life continues to enlarge around it until the wound is no longer the only thing the landscape contains.
Twenty-five years have passed, and I still think often of the people who left home that morning and did not return. I think of their specific absences, of the families whose lives were cut along a line they never saw coming and never stop crossing. I remember the smoke above the skyline. I remember the faces on the walls. I remember the masks and the soldiers and the long strange silence of a city trying to locate itself inside something it had no prior map for. And I remember what I saw in those streets — people reaching for one another with a simplicity that shamed every complicated reason we give ourselves for not doing so.
I still have the photograph of that 20-year-old in lower Manhattan, the burning towers behind him. He is 20 years old and the world has just changed and he doesn’t know yet what it will cost him and so many others to carry this. I know now that the young man in the photograph was doing the only thing he knew how to do with something too large to hold. He was doing, on a lesser scale, the same thing the families were doing with their flyers, the same thing everyone does who has ever pressed a name to a wall and hoped a stranger might stop and look. He was, as we all are in our own different ways, refusing to let it go unnamed.
That is what the camera was for. That is what the flyers were for.
That is what this is for.
