This is how we live now. We will hear the screams of our neighbours as the air fills with smoke and debris, as the unthinkable happens - the two tallest buildings in New York crumble down upon us, like toys, like cheap props in a bad movie. We will watch as our fellow Americans, as US presidents are fond of calling this citizenry, emerge from the catastrophe of downtown Manhattan. Their faces, all of them, regardless of race or ethnicity, are now a ghostly light grey, covered with the thick layer of ash that is enveloping this city. Some of those faces are streaked with blood. All of the faces are frozen in shock.
This is how we live now. We began our new lives at 8.47 a.m. yesterday when a plane streaked across the Manhattan skyline, as planes do all the time. But this one was different. Marco Ponti knew it immediately.
"I was walking up West Broadway and I looked up and saw this two engine commercial airliner. He was low and fast. I looked at a lady walking a dog next me and I said to her that this guy was too low. Then I heard him go full throttle and he crashed into the building. It was suicide. There was no engine sputtering," he said.
Mr Ponti ran upstairs to the building where he works, 11 Beach Street, about eight blocks from the 110-storey World Trade Centre, the twin towers, one of which was now in flames. Some 50,000 people work there, Mr Ponti knew. He grabbed some friends and they went downstairs to watch the fire.
That was when the second plane hit, some 18 minutes after the first.
"Confetti just came down, papers flying out of the windows. There was a fireball." Another co-worker stood at the window of the same building and watched as the second plane hit. She is too frightened to have her name used.
"I can't describe it. It was like I saw the outline of the plane in the building. And this fire," she said.
David Russell, president of American Flight Group, a private airline company and a former high ranking military official, knew immediately what had happened.
"This is a highly sophisticated operation," he said. "This kind of organised attack is the responsibility of a foreign government, not a lone knucklehead." Within minutes the streets of New York were filled with people fleeing downtown. The city was instantly transformed. It was like a strange parade, a procession of refugees dressed differently than we are accustomed to seeing three piece business suits, briefcases clutched tightly, women in power suits and heels, all of them seemingly trying to talk into cell phones.
The north-south streets were filled. Seventh Avenue, known as the capital of the fashion district, even Second Avenue on the east side. The Brooklyn Bridge, a symbol glistening over New York's East River, looks like it is the scene of a strange religious pilgrimage as pedestrians walk to their homes.
They have no choice; the subways have been shut down, the Holland and Lincoln Tunnels closed. Roads are blocked, trains stopped. All the airports in the US are shut down. At Newark Airport in New Jersey, officers with machines guns are stopping cars. "I am concerned about what is in the smoke," said one man walking along the West Side Highway.
Lines began to form outside payphones as both land-based telephone lines and mobile lines began to fail with overload. Lines began to form at bank teller machines as people went into crisis mode.
"I don't know to do," said one woman, sweaty and eyes filled with tears as she entered her apartment building in Greenwich Village. "My boyfriend works in Times Square. Will they hit there? I just went out to buy water." As the morning unfolded, even as the shock of the two planes hitting the World Trade Centre sank in, more news emerged. There were four planes hijacked in the US altogether. Some were still in the air.
Then the further news came. A plane had hit the Pentagon. Another plane had crashed in Pennsylvania.
Greta Van Susteren, a CNN employee, and her husband was sitting on a plane delayed on the tarmac in Washington, DC heading to New York when the first plane hit. It soon became apparent they were going nowhere. They returned to their car which they had left on the roof-top parking lot.
"We saw a plane near the Pentagon and then heard this 'boom'," she said. She was unable to get back into Washington DC because the roads were closed.
As the phone lines became useless, people began emailing. This one from a woman who lives downtown.
"F16's have been flying around here all morning. Every time I hear one I run to the window to make sure it's one of ours. When the first building collapsed, as we watched from my window, we could hear the screams of the people down there. That's how loud the screams were."
People became glued to their televisions as the story unfolded.
American Airlines identified the planes that crashed into the Trade Centre as Flight 11, a Los Angeles-bound jet hijacked after takeoff from Boston with 92 people aboard, and Flight 77, which was seized while carrying 64 people from Washington to Los Angeles.
In Pennsylvania, United Airlines Flight 93, a Boeing 757 en route from Newark, New Jersey, to San Francisco, crashed about 80 miles southeast of Pittsburgh with 45 people aboard. United said another of its planes, Flight 175, a Boeing 767 bound from Boston to Los Angeles with 65 people on board, also crashed, but it did not say where. The fate of those aboard the two planes was not immediately known.
Evacuations were ordered at the UN in New York and at the Sears Tower in Chicago. Los Angeles mobilised its anti-terrorism division, and security was intensified around the naval installations in Hampton Roads, Virginia.
Disney World in Orlando, Florida, was evacuated.
President Bush ordered a full-scale investigation to "hunt down the folks who committed this act". Word was that the President was hunkered down in a bunker in Louisiana.
The White House, the Pentagon and the Capitol were evacuated along with other federal buildings in Washington and New York.
Authorities in Washington immediately began deploying troops, including an infantry regiment. The Situation Room at the White House was in full operation. Authorities went on alert from coast to coast, US and Canadian borders were sealed, all air traffic across the country was halted, and security was tightened at strategic installations.
"This is the second Pearl Harbour. I don't think that I overstate it," said Senator Chuck Hagel, a Nebraska Republican.
By early afternoon, New York hospitals were full ready to help the wounded.
Outside St Vincent's hospital on Seventh Avenue, white gurneys were positioned outside the emergency entrance, waiting for ambulances to arrive.
Doctors and nurses stood on the pavement, their hands in blue rubber medical gloves, ready for the wounded, but strangely idle at this moment. Police had the streets cordoned off from onlookers and volunteers seeking to donate blood.
Ambulances did come. But even though some 152 people were admitted, there was no sense of the hospital being overwhelmed. The gurneys stood mostly empty, white sheets catching the autumn breeze.
Deborah Glick, a local elected state official, stood outside St Vincent's. She had been up early campaigning; this was election day in New York, the city prepared to elect a new mayor.
"I was at the subway stop campaigning for my candidate," said Ms Glick. "Now I am trying to figure out where to give blood." The election was called off. The city was in suspension.
By noon, the two damaged buildings had collapsed, erasing what had seemed a permanent feature of the New York skyline, even though the World Trade Centre had only been there since 1972. In its place, the sky held only a plume of gray smoke, a cloud reminiscent of a volcano.
I remember when I used to work in the World Trade Centre, many years ago, on the 107th floor. I remember when my ears would pop as you were sucked up in the high speed elevators, usually around the 70th floor. I remember last May, standing on the observation deck at night with my friends from Ballymacoda, Co Cork. My friends looked through the telescopes on the roof. The lights of the city glistened below, and you could see the Statue of Liberty on the horizon. From the top of the World Trade Centre it always seemed as if Americans could see everything. That, like the illusion of safety, national security and immunity from the hatred that inflames those willing to die for their cause, was a cruel illusion.