Five years ago I was dirty and sweaty on the Queensborough Bridge.

On September 11th, I was a punk kid who needed to be in New York City because I'd seen some movies and TV shows that made the city seem impossibly complex, light years from the sleepy little towns I'd in which I'd been raised. It was a day that will live on in platitudes and speeches and creepy collector's plates, but I remember it as a scar, a loss, a heartbreak... and the beginning of the end of my youth.

I rode a bike very, very close to the Shit that day. On my way down I purchased a disposable camera from a Pakistani man who sold knick-knacks to tourists. That afternoon I brought the camera to a one-hour photomat and had them printed. I biked to a friend's dorm and scanned them, then sent them off into the ether, more evidence to convict... not the best or the worst quality, but more evidence. More to see.

That night I talked about what I saw on my father's TV station. Later on, I biked over two bridges back to my dorm on Roosevelt Island. I was dirty, my lungs hurt, and I had lost six pounds in seven hours.

In the evening we sat and watched the TV, to find out more, to put together the evidence and make theories and wait, and anticipate, and dread. We had a phenomenal view of the Empire State Building. When the TV said there'd been a credible bomb threat there, I watched it through the glass, glancing back and forth, not wanting to miss the destruction of the silly hopes and wasted ambitions of all my life.