The Night Before

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I wouldn't go so far to say that I had a preminition of what happened to the WTC, but there definitely was something strange in the air that night.

After living overseas for about a year and a half, I was now finally home in New York. This time around I had landed a sweet apartment in Lower Manhattan. Situated about six blocks from the World Trade Center and just two from the South Street Seaport. I could stand on my balcony and see through the canyon of skyscrapers that lined John Street to catch a glimpse of the World Trade Center. All in all, it was a great place to live -- very quiet and peaceful, especially for Manhattan.

Except for the night before the attack.

That whole day I was restless. Work was a stessful and I couldn't concentrate all day. I had decided to take my camera along and take pictures of the WTC/Battery Park City area at lunchtime, but I ended up stuck in a meeting all day.

At the end of the day, I was still quite anxious and tense. So much so, that I decided to walk around a bit before going home. I would have taken pictures but the rain that hit the area pretty much killed that idea. My digital cameras was anything but waterproof.

Even after getting home I was still restless, so I watched a little TV. Then things got wierder.

The intro to the show Third Watch contained a monologue about some guy talking about how fast things can go wrong in life and started mumbling about Chaos Theory. After that show was over, I turned to the History Channel which was playing a [surprise!] WW2 documentary. Suddenly, a few Normandy veterans started saying basically the same thing. They commented about how one minute their friend would be next to them and then the next instant they were dead.

Needless to say, this sort of stuff didn't sit well with me. So I turned off the tube and went to check my email. Imagine my shock when I saw the Yahoo Question of the Day was about Chaos Theory. At this point, I called my parents to make sure everything was OK. I was certain something bad was about to happen, but I didn't know what.

Confused, I decided to go out onto my balcony to get some fresh air. To my shock and amazement, I saw a kind of odd glow in the sky and a strange kind calm in the streets. At this point, I ran back in to get my camera and got a few shots of this phenommenon.

Later, I would try to get some sleep, but with all the odd vibes around me, how could I? I finally fell asleep around 1:30 AM only to awaken again around 3AM from a nightmare. At 5 AM, I fell back to sleep, only to be awoken at a quarter to nine, when a loud boom interrupted my sleep.