I’m disaster-fixated: my dreams are filled with tidal waves, earthquakes, creepy unknowable deaths, nuclear fallout, flaming car crashes, hollowed pits, nausea.

I began going in late to my first post-college job after a round of layoffs that left me in a new office, Times Square instead of Rockefeller Center, with a new boss who left insinuating, obnoxious comments on my IM and ICQ all day long, and a new job title, deflated of its worth in those dot-com downward slope days. In the morning, I made coffee on the stovetop with my roommate’s Moka and drank it sludgy and black as I paced from the bathroom to the living room, watching the towheaded Canadian NY1 announcer.

I was late to work, so I was watching, in real time, as he wondered, he and his similarly blonde-and-blue-eyed co-anchor, what was going on. I watched the live feed. I thought, This is it. I watched something silver bullet into the second tower, and I knew. I called someone at the office, whoever was there at eight-something AM, and said, oh, no, probably I’d stay in Brooklyn today. Maybe come in when things cleared up.

Things seemed fine in Crown Heights all day. We ate pizza on Nostrand Ave while Carribean beats drifted from the dollar store, oblivious.

But before that, I stood on the roof with my ex-boyfriend who still hadn’t moved out, who I’d sleep in the same bed with that night, dreaming of bodies falling from the sky, and my roommate from Minneapolis, who’d just moved in a week earlier. We watched plumes of smoke in the sky, we laughed, we were so far away, and what could we do but laugh or cry. We could not see the paper raining down on Brooklyn Heights until later, on television.

We watched the screen, we screamed, in unison, my ex-boyfriend and I (he reminded me today), we screamed, What the fuck! as we watched the first tower come down on the television. Similarly disaster-fixated he was; we’d talked about our deepest fears as teenagers over a landline while I lay on my parents’ linoleum kitchen floor. What else could we scream? This was New York, shock value at its core. Shock value shocking everyone but those folks serving pizza in a tiled shop on Nostrand Avenue in Crown Heights on September 11, 2001.