On September 11, 2001, I was saying goodbye to my best friend in Lebanon. I had graduated that year and was preparing to leave Beirut for college abroad. My friend’s mother had the television on when her soap opera was suddenly interrupted by a news broadcast: a plane had struck one of the Twin Towers in New York. The footage, the plane disappearing into the building, the smoke pouring from the tower, the anchors trying to describe what was happening in real time… all of it felt absolutely surreal.
We were watching from Lebanon, a country where chaos had become painfully familiar, as the seemingly untouchable United States—and New York, its towering cultural capital—was struck by what, in those first moments, we thought was some incomprehensible accident.