I’ve just come back in from a walk outside. I looked up, and there were the towers of light. It’s been five years, and I hate to say it, but it still hasn’t completely sunk in, what happened that day. The towers of light are ethereal. When they hit a passing cloud, they illuminate the sky as if a full moon were hiding just behind.

Five years ago, I was twenty years old and in college. I should have been sleeping late in my dorm room, or grabbing breakfast in the Cafeteria. However, coming from a blue-collar family and being the first to attend college in my family, I was an opportunist. Every semester that I attended college in New York, I also took a low paying internship, in Finance, wherever I could get my foot in the door. That semester, I had been passed over for an internship in the marketing department for MorganStanely, which was housed in one of the Towers. I did, however, land an internship at CIBC Oppenheimer, housed across the street from the World Trade Center in One World Financial Center. At age twenty, I had to be one of the youngest to work in the area, which probably means I’ll be telling this story to my children many years after most others.

Every morning, I took the E train, which dropped me off under the concourse of the Towers. Odd enough, the same ramp that you walked up when you got off the subway and out the doors into what was once the shopping center underneath the Towers is still there. In that shopping center, under the Towers, I bought my first business suit. There, I window shopped on my lunch hour. You can see the exact point in which this old granite ramp ends and the new dirty concrete begins. Most of my friends don’t know it though, because honestly, most of them came to New York after 9/11. But I know it.