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the day that changed my life.
Posted by: Miguel Melendez from Bronx, NY Tuesday July 30, 2002 @ 07:34 PDT
i live in bronx, ny and work on maiden lane/wall st. area. it was tuesday morning 9/11/01 and as always i got ready for work and take the express 4 or 5 train from where i live to where i get off on fulton st. (downtown). as i got out of the train i heard people yelling & running. i was thinking what the hell is happening here, then i saw two police officer's tell people to get out. my first though was that there was a mad man with a gun or someone had gotten killed, the way the police officers were yelling "get out, now". well being that the train is underground, i went up the stairs with the rest of the people. a woman in front of me as we where going above ground, up the stairs, turns to another woman and said "i smell the smoke, do you smell it?" i though still it might have been some kind of gun fire and we just missed it(thank god). so i looked at my watch and it was 9:05am. then as i reached the top of the last stair out from the underground train station, the towers are just about 500 feet away, maybe less from the train station where i had gotten off. i saw the most unbelievable thing in the world. i saw a fire on one of the towers. at the time i could not tell what cause the fire in tower #1. then i heard people say, "a plane just hit tower #1." i thought my god, how stupid was that pilot, on such a clear beautiful day like today(9/11) to hit that building. i'm sure he had to see the building". i didn't know what to think. that scene changed my life. i saw papers flying high up in the sky all over. i was frozen solid. i was in a daze. i couldn't move. it's unexplainable. after i saw a couple of people jump from the tower and fall down to their deaths. i then woke up from my daze. i felt weak in the knees, so hopeless and found myself crying for those people. then i remebered my sister-in-law worked in that building. i started to panic and ran down towards maiden lane where i worked at the same time i'm trying to call here job to see if she was ok, but i couldn't get through with my cell phone. a recorded message kept saying, "all circuits are busy, please try again". as i was running, crying & panicing i waited desperately on line to use a pay phone. the wait was too long so i kept running towards my job. i finally get there and i go upsairs and ran towards my desk to use the phone and my co-workers see me running in, and start yelling at me that my sister-in-law was already sitting at my desk. she knew where i worked and she just so happend to be running late to work, and she didn't know that her building was hit and they didn't let her in the building. she ran to my job to look for me. usually she's already sitting at her desk by 8:45am everyday and the first plane hit at 8:46am and it also hit the floor where she worked. i later found out from her by her co-workers, that the plane went through her boss's office and her cubicle. so with no doubt, she would have been gone. so as i ran and turn over to my desk she was sitting on my desk trying to call her huband(my brother), and when we saw each other, we jumped on each others arms and hugged tightly for a few minutes and broke down in tears. she's was telling me as she's hugging me and crying, that she could have been dead and her children would have had no mother, etc. by then my co-workers were yelling that the other building was hit and we where under attack. you can see the towers so clearly and so close from our windows at work that it seems the towers are 10 feet away. so i grabbed my sister-in-law and we just ran out the building. at that point i yelled out to everyone in my office that i was leaving, as they where scared for there lives too. we ran out and ran towards the brooklyn bridge and walked across the the bridge. at that point we heard this loud crashing and tower #2 was tumbling down. everyone on the bridge and everything seemed silent, as we watched in horror, as the tower was falling down in slow motion. after that you would hear people yelling and screaming and loud helicopters, police cars, fire turcks, etc. it seems like the end of the world, as everyone thought at that point that the brooklyn bridge was also a target and it was going to blow up with all of us running across it. then an unknown man was running towards all of us on the bridge yelling "the pentagon was just hit(attacked) as well. we all though we're doomed. what a horrible feeling that was. we walk to brooklyn and we walked to my parents apt. since the days of the attacks, i try not to take life for granted and not stress so much about things that are not really important. i try to take life one day at a time and enjoy every minute of it. one just never knows when their day comes and life is over for good!