September 11th of the year 2001 was my first full day of 6th grade. Now that we were the highest grade at our elementary school, we got to line up right in the front of all the little kids, talking and laughing in the small asphalt lot of our school like we were kings of the world. Our first day we had just met our teachers, brought home forms...I remember repeating to my parents that my teacher was "neurotic," not understanding the word.

It's also one of the only days in my life I can remember picture-perfectly, from the moment I awoke, to the moment I went to sleep.

I lived less than a block from school, and walked down with my little brother, congregating with my friends in the parking lot. Our school was a large school in a fairly large town in the Meadowlands next to a fire department, and we were near the hills of North Jersey from which we could see all the way to Manhattan, and down even to Newark and Jersey City. We lived less than two miles from New York City.

Our school day started at 8:45 in the morning on that Tuesday, and we filed noisily into the building, not having the slightest idea that at that same moment a fuel-laden aircraft had struck the World Trade Center.

We started our first period with our young, blond teacher, while jet fuel burned people alive inside the towers. There were twenty-five eager little 11-year-olds in my class, mostly girls, and an 11-year-old me. Little hyperactive runt that I was, I wasn't thinking about school, I was more concerned that I might have to get glasses. My arm was healing from a broken wrist, solidly encased in a cast.

The teachers were talking to one another as we started looking at vocabulary lists. They didn't tell us, but the radio in the teacher's room was saying that unbelievably, a commercial airliner had hit the World Trade Center. Us 6th-graders joked, talked, and made fun of the fat kids while innocent office workers, corporate executives and janitors threw themselves out of a burning building over a thousand feet up, their bodies pulverized on the sidewalks below.

Some teachers were crying that day, and we didn't know why. We were confused, but we didn't read too much into it. The teachers were certainly not informing us that a second plane had hit the World Trade Center, and another had hit the Pentagon, and another had exploded in Pennsylvania.

We didn't have Spanish class that day because our Spanish teacher's brother was a NYPD firefighter, and she had left hysterically crying, driving home to North Bergen to make sure he was all right. Of course, we didn't know that.

My friend Courtney was just as confused as I was. At that moment, the North Tower was collapsing, crushing her father in the wreckage. She didn't know that, and I didn't know that; no one knew that it would be the last happy, content moment of her next few years, before she realized her father was gone.

They called me and three other kids out of class for some reason, maybe two hours after school started. Our health teacher that I had never met before escorted me down to where my dad was waiting in the office, and me and my brother left the school to walk the block home.

Outside, the fire department next to the school was in an uproar, fire trucks roaring down the street, trying to get to New York City.

"Two planes hit the World Trade Center today," my dad said. "One of them collapsed, just fell right to the ground. Another plane hit the Pentagon." I had never seen him so bitter, so disgusted, and it didn't seem right that my dad would show any kind of resignation.

It sounded so unbelievable to me, that the Pentagon of all places was attacked, the symbol of America's military power. That the Twin Towers, where I had stood on the observation deck and looked out over my beautiful fields of my country, the Republic, was gone forever, crushed into rubble and wreckage.

My dad drove my brother and I to a little town on a hill in the Meadowlands because he said he wanted to show us something. As we drove down New Jersey's highways, two miles from the city, there was an ugly cloud of black smoke rising through the air that somehow made everything more real.

We stood on a hill in the Meadowlands, my dad gripping our shoulders, and looking out on New York City, so close to us. Smoke and fire filled the air over the city, a huge, hellish column of smoke and fumes rising miles into the air, the World Trade Center collapsing into itself beneath. The pillar of death rose up interminably, brilliantly into the air, higher than any plane. The smell of burning flesh and plastic reached my nose as I looked on the destruction, and I started to cry.

My New York City, where I had seen plays on Broadway, where I had walked the South Street Seaport and visited the Statue of Liberty, where my parents and family had walked through the beautiful, rich halls of the World Trade Center, looking out over the observation deck at the world, was destroyed. The two bastions of America on the skyline replaced by an inferno of black smoke and ash, billowing out and rising.

My dad had wanted to show us evil that day, he'd shown us what people were capable of. He took us home, but every day for the next three months, every time we looked out at the city, we saw the smoke, the city burning endlessly. We lit candles at our church and prayed for the thousands of dead, especially the ones that we knew.

I ate a ham sandwich at my dining room table, and my aunts and uncles and cousins gathered at the house to watch the coverage, just to not be alone. My mom hadn't come home yet from her work at the high school, and my cousin had just escaped through the Lincoln Tunnel from her job in Midtown Manhattan, where she had watched the planes hit the towers. She maintained that it would be World War Three by the next morning.

My mom came home, shaken. She had been working in the guidance counselor's office at the high school, and all day she had nothing but teenagers in there screaming and crying that their parents were in the World Trade Center and couldn't get out. People were accepting phone calls in school from their moms and dads, tearfully telling them that they loved them before the towers fell.

My mom answered a phone call that day from a man's cell phone. It was from a New York City firefighter whose son attended the school. He was trapped in the stairwell of the towers, and was begging for help, he was begging that my mom send someone to rescue him. My mom talked to him, trying to comfort him and said that she would tell his son that he loved him with all his heart. The ear-splitting rumbling of the falling towers began, the fireman screamed, and the line went dead.

We watched TV as a family that night, calling our friends and making sure they were okay. My mom's friend was on a cigarette break from his job at the WTC when the planes hit, and he had been showered with severed body parts and fluttering papers as he ran away in terror from the buildings.

I went in to my room, played some Final Fantasy VII, and talked to some friends online. Evidently, a lot of kids I knew had parents working at the WTC, not all of whom would survive. Before I went to bed, I told my dad a stupid joke I heard on Spongebob Squarepants, about pirates going to "arrr"-rated movies...he laughed, and said that we would need some humor in these dark days to come. America, and my life, would not be the same.

The next day a lot of kids were absent. Courtney was absent, for her father had been killed. My Spanish teacher's brother, the fireman, had been seriously wounded in the tower's collapse, but he was alive.

There was a man from my town - I'll call him Liam Hartford - who was about a year older than my dad, and they had been friends in high school. Liam was an all-star football player, who later became an FBI agent; my dad was a track runner who became a graphic designer. On September 11, Liam was working in New York City, in the Marriot at the foot of the World Trade Center. The planes collapsed, and Liam served his country by going up the stairs and down, bringing injured people to safety.

Right before the tower collapsed, Liam was in the Marriot Lobby at the ground floor of the World Trade Center. A policeman told him to get out, to escape, but Liam said a co-worker was trapped, and he had to reach him. Liam quickly ran through the North Tower concourse and up the staircase, and that was the last anyone saw of him alive. The tower collapsed five minutes later, the walls shattering as the weight of the building crashed down onto Liam. They found his thighbone, burned and black.

At Liam's funeral, the director of the FBI came to our city, as well as the Secretary of State, and other important people, and reportedly George Bush himself. Snipers lay on the roof opposite our church as all these high government figures escorted the casket of Liam Hartford down the church steps. It seemed the whole town came to his funeral and services, and we all walked home to our houses in a daze.

The world knows what happened next; Osama bin Laden was fingered as the culprit, and our nation mourned the three thousand dead, and Congress passed the Patriot Act, and we invaded Afghanistan...but that was the story as I know it, as an 11-year-old from North Jersey, who knew New York City as his second home.

They say that people from around New York have too much emotional connection to 9/11 to make decisions about it...maybe that's true. I know I'll never forget that day, no matter how far I am away from New York, and I know my mom will never forget the screams of the fireman as he died...

I'll never forget watching the towers burn to the ground, looking at New York over the Palisades, never forget my Spanish teacher leaving the school in tears, never forget when Courtney realized her dad was never coming home from work that day, never forget the solemn dignity of Liam's funeral, and above all, I'll never forget watching the city burn, the immense tower of smoke and fire rising into the air higher than the clouds, a dark ghost reflected in the Hudson River...

...and I don't want to. New York will always remember the destruction and tears of September 11th, and I'll always know the good and evil in the world. There will always be evil, the hijackers mercilessly killing the innocents, Osama bin Laden praising the attacks, Palestinians cheering for the death of my friend's parents...

...but there will be good to counter evil. There will be Liam Hartfords to go up the stairs into the fire against the face of death, to rescue those in trouble, and lay down their lives for something higher.

It's been five years and I can still recall perfectly the look and scent of the smoke rising off the WTC, and the looks on classmates faces when they came back to school, their parents dead. Five years go by in an instant.