I fled Lower Manhattan on 9/11. The memory still haunts me

One thing everyone who was in NYC on 9/11 says is how beautiful the weather was. And it definitely was a beautiful, bright and crisp day. I recently landed a temp-to-perm job sorting mail and converting hard copy bond notes to digital files in the J.J. Kenny Repository at Standard and Poor’s on 55 Water Street, very close to the Twin Towers. I was 20 and trying to prove I deserved to keep my job, so I would get to work at 8 and leave after my boss. 9/11 was no exception, and I was standing at my boss’s desk when we saw what at the time we thought was a news helicopter hit the north tower.We all stood watching, trying to figure out what had happened. I called my mom from my boss’s desk. She was in mountain time, two hours earlier, so I woke her up. I told her that a news helicopter had crashed into World Trade and to turn on the news. We were on the phone when Tower Two was hit, watching it at the same time from very different vantage points. Without pause she said, “Get out of that building right now.” I told her I would and that I loved her.Related: The stories of 9/11's LGBTQ+ heroesWe were on the 45th floor, and everyone was in a state of shock. The building intercom came on and told us to shelter in place and that they were shutting the elevators down. I wanted to get out, and so did my friends Alice and Taisha. People really dressed up for work back then. Alice and Taisha were both in skirts and heels and I was in slacks, dress shoes, and a button down. The three of us decided we would not stay put, so we made our way to the stairwell, surprisingly some of the only people making the trek, the girls still in their heels.When we finally made it down, it looked like a grey snow made of shredded office paper was starting to fall. We had no context for what was actually happening, so we decided we would try and hop on the train at Bowling Green, which now seems like an extremely weird instinct, but we were all young. As we walked up, we saw a flood of terr