I couldn’t watch the TV for at least a week.
My wife was camped out in front of it but I couldn’t watch.
Instead I chose to just sit on our bed and strum my guitar for hours, playing louder than usual in hopes to drown out the television audio that was only a Brooklyn apartment’s distance away.
To be fair, the news was the only thing that was available. It wasn’t like they were going to run episodes of “How I Met Your Mother” at a time like this. All sports and travel and work and, well, everything really was suspended. All we really had was the news, that guitar and each other.
I was sitting on that same bed, strumming that same guitar when the first plane hit earlier that week. I was still working in advertising back then and there was no point in getting to the agency before 10AM. So after my wife left for work, I’d practice for a half hour before taking the short subway ride into Manhattan.
We lived right across the harbor. You could see the towers if you looked at an angle from our kitchen window.
I heard the collision but I had no idea.
“Some truck must have really eaten it on the Brooklyn Queens Expressway,” I thought to myself as I grabbed my messenger bag and headed into work.
By the time I entered and exited the subway people were rumbling. And when I scaled the station stairs at 6th Avenue and 23rd Street, I looked down the canyon and saw the smoke billowing from the building.
It wasn’t until I got to the agency and walked into my bosses office that we saw the second plane hit in real time and started to get an inkling of what was actually happening.
The rest of the day feels like a vaseline smeared blur. The Pentagon. Pennsylvania. The packed and silent subway ride home after collecting my wife from the office after they restarted mass transit so kids could get home from school. The soot that covered our neighborhood.
And the smell. The smell of jet fuel and twisted metal and despair. That is not hazy. I can still feel that smell in my nose 25 years later.
The days and weeks after, the search, the clean up, the concerts, the sporting events, the camaraderie, it all made this feel like the biggest thing that we were ever going to go through.
And, in many ways it has been. But what no longer surprises me now isn't what happened that day. It's how differently people seem to remember it. Or don’t remember it at all.
For a while it felt like we'd discovered something we'd forgotten. That we actually belonged to one another. That strangers would help strangers. That politics and careers and neighborhoods.
Seemingly that is also part of the lasting legacy. Rather than the hope and promise we all held for each other as a community that would band together after the vulnerabilities of such an event we’ve seen people drift apart. Having experienced it all first hand, this is a painful reality.
Many may not realize but the actual name of our gyms are not “The Fort” but “The Fort NYC”. This has always been an important distinction. NYC is where we started and where we have always been. NYC is often at the forefront of just about everything. The City is in our heritage. It’s in our bones.
And maybe that's why small group training always felt like the right model. It's a reminder that people accomplish remarkable things together that they almost never accomplish alone.
I built a place where strangers become teammates because I experienced firsthand what a city looks like when strangers become teammates.
When early September comes around I find myself taking the opposite approach. Rather than hiding in the bedroom I turn the television on. I watch the documentaries and retrospectives. I take in the blue beams of light that fill the sky as I take my dog out for the last walk of the night. And I try to relive and breathe in the pain that we all felt a quarter century ago.
All of it is my small way of honoring our beloved city both then and now. And upholding the promise that we all made back then to never forget.