It's hard for me to acknowledge that five years have passed.

The aftermath, or recovery, from being directly affected by the terror attacks on September 11th, have been very much like I anticipated in 2001. I think of the friends I lost, like they were with me yesterday. I can still hear their voices in my head and I consider that a gift. I still see their smiles, without their faces having dimmed in my mind.

The difference for me, five years later, is simply everything. September 11th changed my life. For the rest of my life, I will remember who I was before September 11, 2001 and after. Everything changed.

There hasn't been a day since that day, that I haven't thought about terrorists attacking. Every day that I go to work, everyday I don't work, even on vacation, the possibility of another attack is on my mind. I'm not living in fright, but I live with those thoughts. Just as I enjoy a beautiful day on the beach, I think about how easily it could be interrupted by a plane blowing up in the sky over the ocean view that I am appreciating.

Before September 11th, when I saw a plastic bag blow in the wind, I would think about that beautiful scene in "American Beauty" when the kid filmed it. Since September 11th, when I see a plastic bag or a paper flyer blow in the streets, I remember the days after the attack. I remember catching a memo in my hand that had been on someone's desk or in their file cabinet before they were incinerated. Everywhere you walked on this island, there was some debris. A film covered cars miles uptown.

I remember being coated in ash for days. I remember that foreign smell that we smelled for weeks. We thought the smell was from chemicals and steel melting; it was more likely of human flesh and hair burning.

I remember walls of flyers. We desperately distributed flyers. It's ridiculous to thnk about now - flyers of so many people missing. Like anyone would have been able to match a face with a patient. I understand now for what it was - something to do from feeling helpless. A way to process the events of that day.

When I think back on the immediate events of that that day, my favorite memories, are of how New Yorkers responded.

We (yes, I include myself as a New Yorker, because that living through that event here makes me one - I see now), are often perceived as cold, angry citizens. New Yorkers couldn't be further from that description. Yes, we are impatient. But we are good people. We help each other and we help visitors. We love our city, but that doesn't mean we hate those who don't live here. We welcome you to what's ours, you're just not in our club. You have a guest membership.

That day, New York made me proud to be a part of her. In what easily could have been chaos, was order. There were no LA riots in NYC. There was no New Orleans looting and pillaging. New Yorkers helped each other. They lined up for blocks and blocks to donate their own blood for their neighbors. Blood, that sadly, was never used. They went downtown to offer to help dig, they brought food and water to rescue workers. Even weeks later, they acted more kindly to strangers. I remember one day maybe a month after the attacks, I was standing midtown waiting for a light to turn and it began to pour. A stranger moved over to me, to cover me with his umbrella and he shrugged his head and said, "Well, we're all in this together now," and walked me to the next corner.

On this fifth anniversary, those are some of my memories. Most important of all, are these people.

No different than you. They look like your neighbors, friends from high school, someone you played intramural football with, someone you sat next to on a beach one time, someone you sat next to at a baseball game. Just people working to support themselves and/or their families, who arrived for work on a beautiful Tuesday morning in September. Sat down at their desks, goaned at the early hour and wished they were still sleeping, turned on their computers, sipped their coffee, read the papers and then were mass murdered at their desks; trapped as their offices turned into infernos.

Honor them with your memory.

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