Remembering that sci-fi feeling

Today we pause to reflect on and remember the victims of September 11 as well as the first responders and journalists who helped share their stories from this day with the world. #NeverForget #September11 pic.twitter.com/qlIjCgUzXA

— Freedom Forum Institute (@FreedomForumIns) September 11, 2018

Memory Served: 11 September 2001, Mandaluyong City

It was an ordinary Tuesday night in the first studio unit we rented together. It was the year I momentarily stopped working for our community-based organization, and went back to freelance PR and events work. It was nearly nine in the evening, I was about to get in bed, while my mind was running to-do things for the next day. I was scheduled to have a meeting with the client for the amateur art competition I was contracted to implement.

My mental check-listing was interrupted. "Look at this," he told me, directing my attention to the television. It was on CNN. One of the towers of the iconic World Trade Center in New York City had a big smoking hole near the top. He and his friends watched a lot of sci-fi, so I had to ask if I was looking at a scene from a film. No. It's really CNN. Live. We watched, mostly in silence, as announcers try to establish facts as they came in from reporters on the scene, what other networks are saying, etc. From time to time, the announcer would say, "for those who have tuned in just now..." (That got annoying after a while.) I couldn't decide whether I was feeling unreal or surreal.

My mind has blurred at the moment, I may not be remembering the next sequence accurately, but in between discussions of whether this is a work of terrorists, the last time WTC was attacked, and unconfirmed reports of something happening in Washington D.C. too, another plane came into the frame and crashed into the other tower. Shock. From the announcers on CNN, and from both of us watching on TV from the other side of the world. This scale of disaster had no precedent in cine verite.

The Youtube video below was what we watched that evening of 11 September 2001 - excluding the TVCs - inside a studio apartment, Barangka Drive, Mandaluyong City, on what was a normal weeknight until that moment past eight, nearly nine in the evening. (Warning: Over one hour long.)





The following day, before my meeting with my client formally started, I attempted to start a conversation about the WTC terrorist attack. She stared at me with that look I'd realize either meant she didn't know what I was talking about, or she had not a single care about it. I thought, just maybe they'd be as shocked and saddened as I had, especially for marketing people who were investing on a project about young people's eyes to the world. My next thought was, I'd need to go back working in civil society to save my humanity.