The panicked pounding tore Karina from her sleep. It sounded like someone was running down the hall, banging on doors. She never heard anything like it before. Her apartment was on the top floor, there wasn’t much foot traffic up there.

It’s a dream, she thought, or I’m hearing things. But then she noticed the sirens screaming, like they were in the background but they were not. Sirens plural, many times over, an endless stream of them coming from every direction. If this was a dream, it was a bad one. As she pulled herself awake, another frightening noise breached her apartment – the sound of people running across the roof of her building. Karina realized that something was wrong. Very wrong.

Throwing open her curtains, she was confronted by a hellscape of smoke. Thick, black, plumes of smoke, moving across the sky like Dante’s quill across a blank page. She thought, is it a huge warehouse fire?

As she struggled to overcome her sensory overload, Karina’s phone rang. It was her sister: “Have you heard what happened, there’s been an accident. An airplane flew into one of the Towers!” While she was finishing that sentence, the second plane hit, and they both knew it was no accident.

Karina started hopping around her apartment, like the floor was made of lava. In time she collected herself and went up on the roof, to see the horror unfolding, above, below, all around her.

At the same time, in another part of the city, a man Karina did not know had overslept. Lee knew he wouldn’t make his morning meeting in the Towers, so he took the subway to his office instead. When he got up to the street he saw an odd movement and turned to his side, just in time to see the first Tower fall. Slowly, at first. Silently.

Lee looked to the second Tower and saw that it was surrounded by dots – so many dots - falling earthward. The image still lives in Lee’s head. Even today, he can’t help but put himself in those peoples’ shoes, having to make the decision they did.

And then the second Tower fell.

The man Lee was to meet that day? He was on time.

Nobody comes together like New Yorkers when there’s a need. People poured into the streets, blocks and blocks of them, setting up triage stations, lining up to give blood, ready to care for the wounded.

But the wounded never came. If they didn’t get out before the collapse, they were gone.

Following the attack, the city was consumed by a collective grief. It was palpable, intense, there was never a day that Karina didn’t cry. For the first few weeks she rarely changed out of her bathrobe. She could not get to her sister, because the bridges and tunnels were closed.

The city felt like, smelled like, a war zone. Non-stop military planes and helicopters. Missing person posters glued to every surface, put there by people who knew in their hearts that their loved ones were gone.

Karina was a professional dancer at the time, supplementing her income waiting tables. After that day, the restaurant where she worked hired two new people. They had previously worked at Windows On the World, a restaurant atop the North Tower. Scheduled for a breakfast meeting on that horrific September morning, the two were late. They survived. Ninety of their coworkers attended the meeting, they did not.

Life and death can be random. Karina and Lee, now husband and wife, living their life in Ned. The luck of the draw, but there was no draw. I try to make sense of it, but I come up blank.

So I remember those who died. I don’t know why – it doesn’t change things, it doesn’t fix anything, it doesn’t help anyone. But for me, it’s all I can do. I remember them.