At 8:46 a.m. on Sept. 11, 2001, I was startled awake by a loud boom. Its the first thing I remember from what would become the unforgettable and terrifying morning I spent with a total stranger just eight blocks away from the World Trade Center.

I had slept over at my then-girlfriend Beths new apartment in Tribeca the night before. It was located on Reade Street, less than a mile north of the north face of the WTCs north tower.

Beth and I had dated since college, and she had just moved to New York to start her first job in the city. She lived with two roommates, and her bedroom window looked due south onto the lower part of Manhattan. During the initial few weeks shed lived in the apartment, neither of us had ever noticed that the World Trade Center could be seen from her large window until the night of Sept. 10.

Maybe it was just a coincidence, maybe it was something more, but that night we realized that if you looked directly out of Beths 10th-floor bedroom window, you found yourself gazing at 7 World Trade Center, a nondescript rectangular office building about 50 stories tall. You needed to crane your neck and look almost straight up to see the north tower, looming twice as tall, with its antenna rising even higher. Off to the left you could see the eastern edge of the south tower the north towers twin.

Also on the night of Sept. 10, I was introduced to a friend of one of Beths roommates. She was visiting from the D.C. area and, as I recall, was going to spend a few days apartment hunting in Manhattan. We chatted very briefly, and my hunch, as I remember back to our brief meeting, is that I forgot her name almost immediately (a flaw of mine that persists to this day).

Beth and her roommates left for work early on the morning of Sept. 11. After the loud boom Id heard, I lay in bed alone with the blinds closed. Since I couldnt see that days piercing blue sky, I assumed what I heard must have been thunder. It wasnt until the radio alarm clock clicked on a few minutes later that I heard a morning DJ say, It looks like a plane has flown into the World Trade Center. I sprang to the window, pulled open the blinds, and stared up at a gaping, smoke-filled hole in the face of the north tower. The plane had flown almost directly over our building.