That morning, the sky was blue: not a single cloud in sight

The sky was a perfect kind of blue without a single cloud in sight; it was still t-shirt and shorts weather. Nine years later and I can still remember what it smelled like, the way my skin was numb, the mass exodus to go north or just get the fuck off the island, and the strangeness of hearing total silence that night: no cars, no planes, not a goddamn thing except for a fighter jet that screamed overhead every now and then that freaked us the fuck out. 

Everybody was in shock. It was so offensive and so personal, like getting punched right in the mouth...nobody knew what to think or what to feel.  Am I supposed to be a an ignorant gung-ho idiot and say I hate all Muslims?  Am I supposed to preach peace, love and tolerance, so the terrorists don't win?  Somebody tell us what the fuck we're supposed to feel, because right now nobody fucking knows.

For days afterward, people walking around like zombies in the middle of 5th Avenue and Broadway because everything below 14th St was in the lockdown zone (no cars except emergency vehicles), making crazy shadows in the dust (which hung around for a solid 3 weeks) especially when the sun was low -- like out of a horror movie.

The Cortlandt Street stop

I remember the mall that was underneath the towers: Cortlandt Street stop on the 1-9.  Or the N-R stop a couple blocks away.  MetroCards were blue and tokens had that pentagon-shaped silver thing in the middle (after they replaced the ones with the hole in the middle and the ones with the big cutout Y of N-Y-C).  Hell, just walk it -- just a few blocks.  Go the back way through Battery Park: go into that other mall with all of the glass and metal, take the bridge across the West Side Highway; forget about trying to cross it at street level: you'll die.  

I used to go into the Sam Goody in the basement mall underneath the towers as a kid, trying to figure out which CD I was going to waste my money on to stick into my bright yellow Sony discman.  I remember the greasy and overpriced slices at the Sbarro.  I remember snickering at all the poor Jersey fucks who had to take the friggin' PATH train to come into my city.  I remember the bigass escalators in the lobbies, with all of the international flags on the second floor.  

Suits on Motorolas and Nextels, and tourists all over the place, waiting for the elevators.  Shoeshine guys buffing away on Italian leather wingtips that cost more than your parents made in a month.  Express elevators that skipped whole bunches of floors -- different ones for different sky lobbies.  I remember the home video my dad took of me on the roof when I was little, and how the audio on the VHS was all fucked up from the interference from the gigantic antenna and how absurdly small the city's huge buildings looked, with little yellow matchbox cars sliding up and down the pencil-thin streets with little tiny dots playing Frogger in between them.  

I remember eating lunch in the plaza at the base of the towers: sitting at the fountain thing with the big metal globe, surrounded by businessmen taking drags off of their cigarettes in between bites of a $1 hotdog and a Poland Spring or Snapple, their suit jackets folded neatly beside them, company badges and ID cards hanging from belt loops or shirt pockets or coat lapels.  Tourists, arched backwards aiming their cameras straight up, trying to get both towers in the frame, pointing towards infinity.  I remember exiting any subway station within sight of the WTC and automatically looking for the towers to orient myself: our compass.

What do you remember?