Recalling 9/11

It was simply one of those incidents where you can clearly remember what you were doing when it happened.

It was also a Tuesday evening and I was busy working at my laptop at the small studio apartment at Prince George's Park I shared with another fellow graduate student at the National University of Singapore. I remember receiving a text message from another graduate student (who had a tv at his own flat) saying that a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center in New York. My first reaction then was that this was another hoax because some months or years before a small plane had crashed into the World Trade Center; there was a similar incident where the news turned out to be a hoax or something. So I replied saying that it might be a hoax and got back to work. Several minutes later, however, that same friend sent a text message saying that another plane had crashed into the other WTC tower. That's when I started thinking that this might be real after all and decided to check the Internet for news. But I couldn't upload any news website at all. Instead of CNN, I would get a page saying that the website was too busy. I couldn't get anything either on Yahoo! News. After that I don't remember what else I did except that I anxiously tried to get some news and was frustrated for a long time. Then I finally got the Yahoo! News website and that's when I read that one tower had already collapsed. I was stunned. I relayed the news to my roommate who was equally shocked. Then later came the news that the other tower had collapsed as well. I don't think what was happening had began to sink in even then. It was just too horrible beyond belief. Too terrible to comprehend.

Of course, my friends and I could talk of nothing else for the next few days. Even my friend all the way out in Washington state emailed a short message to assure me that he was okay but that he felt so vulnerable all of a sudden. He most probably had seen it all unfold on television. It was indeed so surreal.