The Morning Everything Stopped..

My Personal Memory of September 11, 2001

By: Damien J. Branch | September 11th, 2026 | Friday 5:20am EST

I was supposed to get a haircut. That's one of the strangest things I remember about September 11, 2001. Not because the haircut mattered, because it didn't. That's exactly the point, I was 20 years old, staying at my grandmother's house in South Jamaica, Queens. My family had moved out to Long Island, but life had brought me back to Grandma's house for a while.

I was working. Going to school. Taking trains back and forth. Living that regular New York life where you don't really think about how much you're moving because everybody is moving. That Tuesday morning wasn't supposed to be important.

I was going to make my grandmother some breakfast. Get myself together, go get a haircut, then head to work, that's it. It was just another day, I had Channel 11 on. They had recently started doing morning news, and I liked watching it because the crew felt young. It was something new. So I'd started making a habit of putting them on in the morning. Then the special report came across the screen. A plane had hit the World Trade Center.

My first thought wasn't terrorism, I don't think most people's was in that initial moment, It was more like, Damn. How does something like that happen? Planes flew around New York every day. Maybe something went wrong. Maybe there was just an accident.

Then I watched the second plane hit, Live... So whatever explanation I had been trying to make in my head disappeared, I remember staring at the television like Whoa. There are certain moments where your brain understands something before you have the words for it, that was one of them. Something was wrong, like really wrong.

Then I Looked Out the Window

My grandmother's house had this upstairs window with a ledge outside. I used to climb out there sometimes. I'd sit, play music, look at the stars, look toward Manhattan. Just one of those little places you have when you're young that doesn't mean anything to anybody else but means something to you. So I went up there, and I looked toward the city. I could see the thick black smoke. That's the part that's difficult to explain to somebody who experienced September 11 through television.

I was watching it on television too, but then I could walk over to the window and see evidence of it with my own eyes. Manhattan was up in smoke. My friends started coming outside. Everybody was basically saying some version of the same thing:

"Yo... did you see what just happened?" Nobody had answersat all. There was no social media to refresh, no group chat feeding you clips from 30 different angles.

No Twitter timeline explaining what somebody thought was happening five seconds after it happened. We only had television, phones, each other.

New York Just... Stopped

I was supposed to work later that day. The company I worked for built cabinets, and here's one of those details that still feels strange 25 years later: We were working on a job for offices in the World Trade Center. So, I called my boss. What do you even say in that moment? "You see what's happening?" Of course he did, everybody did honestly

He basically told me to stay home, there wasn't anything else to do. Transportation was being disrupted. Airports shut down. People couldn't get where they were going. Friends couldn't get to work. Parents were trying to figure out how to get to their children.

New York, the city where everybody is always going somewhere, stopped. Meanwhile, all these completely normal pieces of September 11 were still sitting there. Fabolous' first album dropped that day, Jay-Z dropped The Blueprint. Those things mattered a whole lot to a 20-year-old New York kid when I woke up. Then suddenly they didn't. The normal world didn't slowly fade away, almost like somebody flipped a switch.

Then the Towers Came Down

We watched everything happen in real time. The second plane, The Pentagon. The reports of another plane. People running for safety, people jumping to escape fire and smoke. First responders going toward something everybody else was desperately trying to get away from. People covered from head to toe in dust, eventually... the towers falling. If you weren't alive then, you've probably seen the footage. Watching historical footage and watching something happen right now are two completely different experiences.

There was no documentary narrator telling us what it meant, nobody knew what happened next. Nobody knew whether another plane was coming. Nobody knew whether New York was still under attack. No one knew if somebody they loved was going to make it home. We were finding out at the same time the rest of the world was.

I Think That's the Part People Born After 9/11 Can't Completely Feel

My children know a world after September 11, you know, to them, airport security being intense isn't something that suddenly appeared. Cameras everywhere aren't unusual.

Heavy security around important buildings isn't strange. September 11 itself is something they can learn about in school, it's just another history lesson. I remember the world before it. I'm realizing that's a strange sentence to write. I mean, I'm 45 now, Twenty-five years have passed since then. I have children who weren't even close to being born when I was sitting in my grandmother's house watching Channel 11 that morning. I hadn't even met the woman who would become my wife yet. There was an entire life waiting for me that 20-year-old kid at the time couldn't see in front of him. That same kid had absolutely no idea when he woke up that morning that he was about to witness something his future children would read about in textbooks.

There's Something Else I Remember

New Yorkers came together for real, and I don't mean that in the polished, inspirational way we sometimes talk about tragedies years later. People were really scared. A lot of people were angry. People were confused, and some of that fear unfortunately got pointed at innocent Muslim Americans and people who simply looked like they might be from the Middle East. That's part of the truth of that period too, it was sad to see. I also remember people checking on each other more. People from other states calling New Yorkers, offering help, sympathy, compassion.

Flags started appearing everywhere. Those little American flag magnets were suddenly on cars all over the place. Police officers, Firefighters, EMTs. People coming from New Jersey, Long Island and beyond trying to help. For a little while, strangers didn't feel quite as much like strangers, it's because New York City was wounded, so New Yorkers treated each other like we were wounded together.

Twenty-Five Years Later

I honestly think September 11 changed something in me that I didn't fully understand when I was younger. It taught me how ordinary the beginning of a life-changing day can look. That's what stays with me till this day. Nobody woke up that morning knowing the fate of everyone was about to change. People kissed their spouse goodbye, dropped their kids off, grabbed coffee, complained about traffic, got on trains, went to work, made plans for later.

I mean, I wanted a haircut that day and pick up my check, then 8:46 in the morning happened. That's why, as I've gotten older, I've become more conscious about pictures, making memories. Telling my people I love them more. Being more present, trying not to leave important things unsaid.

I'm not perfect at any of it still, but somewhere inside me is still that 20-year-old looking out of his grandmother's upstairs window toward Manhattan and seeing smoke where smoke wasn't supposed to be, and seeing the world stop. September 11 taught my generation something we probably would've preferred not to learn that young: Normal is not a guaranteed thing. The day you're barely paying attention to might become the day you remember for the rest of your life.