What strikes me now, is a transformation. The days after September 11, 2001 felt like a different America from the one I read about now. New York City felt noble in its unity. It's a strange word to use - but the way people came together made me feel better about humanity.
The two planes going into the two landmarks dominating the city felt like an attack on all of us. People soon gathered in their thousands, silently with candles, in Union Square. Former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani seemed like a leader who led us all. "I want the people of New York to be an example to the rest of the country, and the rest of the world, that terrorism can't stop us," he said, which got it exactly right.
A few days after the attacks, the Stars and Stripes was everywhere, including in a Middle Eastern bakery near where I lived in the East Village. People across the political spectrum felt the flag was theirs.
I remember that spirit of togetherness: sharing a taxi away from Ground Zero with a Chinese-American who was trying to get to a hospital because she was going into labour. She gave me the phone number of her husband so I could tell him she was OK.
And the hurt people suffered still stays with me.
A few months after the day, I visited a widow in Connecticut whose husband had been trapped above floor 99 of the North Tower where the plane had gone in. She had talked to him constantly on the phone from home as she watched the burning tower on television in which the man she loved was trapped. She would tell him to try going to the roof - maybe there was a way out - and he would go and return to the phone. No way out there.
And then at 10.28am New York time, the tower - and her husband and her life with him - crashed to the ground. As I talked to her, I noticed that she was stroking the wooden dining table where we sat as though it was a person. I asked her why and she told me it was made by her husband.
The collapse of both towers was like what engineers would call a perfect demolition - the whole structure came down mostly within its own footprint. The steel at the base buckled in the intense heat, and the weight above did the rest.
That heat still defies the imagination. A domestic oven can get up to about 250 degrees. The best estimate of the heat above the impact was four times that.
That temperature drove people to the unimaginable decision that jumping to certain death was the only option.
Those watching were hurt, too. A photographer I got to know - David Handschuh - witnessed some of the jumpers hitting the footpath - until the South Tower collapsed, trapping him beneath the rubble.
"I heard voices from where I was trapped and calling out for help," he said later. "I found the first of my guardian angels that morning in the forms of firefighters from Engine 217 in Brooklyn who pulled me out of the rubble and dragged me to safety."
The firefighters took him to a nearby deli for safety, and from there he was taken by paramedics by boat to a hospital across the Hudson in New Jersey.
Following his physical recovery, he suffered mental agonies, imagining demons under the bed at night. He, formerly a hard news photographer, couldn't face taking pictures of anything more threatening than food
As he recovered, he started visiting the memorial at Ground Zero, noting the way the light changed. "It could be a grey day, a rainy day, a snowy day. If you showed up every single day at exactly the same time, the Trade Center site looks different.
"And for me that's a true impetus to move forward, to keep on living, keep on surviving, keep on worrying about other New Yorkers."
My hurt was nothing like his. I never saw jumpers and I wasn't trapped. I only had one moment of real fear, when the North Tower collapsed and the debris rushed at me faster than I thought I could run.
But a sound remains with me. I was on the ground floor of the South Tower when the North Tower was hit, and the ungodly crash resounded across the World Trade Center.
Even today, a certain kind of metallic crunch makes me flinch.
A few days after the attacks, I bought a jersey with the flag blazoned across the front. I wore it proudly then. I wouldn't now.
