They interrupted Mozart

I realized I haven't written about today since October 2001, when I was sitting amongst fellow "re-located" Stuyvesant students in a classroom at Brooklyn Tech and was asked by my English teacher to do so. Today, I have nothing left of the memories of the "walk" other than the rare nightmare of a plane crash. So, eight years later, after Fajr, I tried to put myself back in the thoughts of my fourteen year old self, and this is what I wrote.

I guess you can read this for background.

They interrupted Mozart!

In second period music class,

two planes, just two buildings,

"Nothing to worry about-

send everyone to third period."

World history. The teacher

turns on our television, there is

an ominous hole.

"They can fix that, right?"

I whisper to a student.

The darkness grows outside the window

with my questions:

(How will I go back to Queens?

Is my father out there, in his cab?)

and is interrupted by flickering lights

and our screams as a shockwave

comes through from the second tower's fall.

But we sit, in world history

and watch the World fly around us,

in black garbage bags

and white

and every gradient

of steel,

and when the colossals have

collapsed, in their entirety

the chancellor says we can leave.

We're taken outside, where

the class separates within minutes,

walking backwards as we stare at the smoke.

I'm angry at my poor choice of sandals.

I'm angry because even after ten years

as a New Yorker I still

craned my neck staring up at the towers

every time I passed.

They were that grand and that

beautiful, and now they had been taken

from me and my city.

It's my first week of high school,

do I even have any good friends yet?

I look for friendly strangers.

"I just want to call my parents,

I only knew how to get home

from the World Trade Center Stop."

They give me

quarters, but my father's cell phone,

anyone's cell phone,

is not working.

So I walk to Penn Station with a family

that buys me lo mein and Snapple

Orangeade for lunch. "We'll get you to

the E. We are going to Queens, too."

But the E train they put me on was not

the one I remembered.