I t's been five years, but still, I feel nervous about speaking the words aloud. Does anybody else miss the days immediately following 9/11?

Don't misunderstand me; autumn of 2001 was a season of horror and uncertainty. The morning of 9/11, I was working on the 36th floor of a Center City office building. Being so high up and watching both towers crumble to the earth was unsettling. Even more unsettling was thinking about my wife, elsewhere in the city, standing in front of a classroom of third graders. How was she explaining this to her students? What was she thinking?

That morning, she was two months pregnant.

That day was also our fourth wedding anniversary.

(At least I'll never forget, right?)

We both made it home by midday; schools and work had let out. We spent the day like most people: staring at the television, waiting for the story to stop. Our anniversary presents sat on the kitchen table, unopened. Instead, I opened a bottle of wine.

Two years before, we both worked in Manhattan. The view outside of my office at Broadway and Bleecker was of the silver towers of the World Trade Center. We would often meet at the mall below the towers to do a little shopping or just wander around. (The Borders there was awesome.) We were newly married, living in New York. The Twin Towers were at the center of our new universe, positioned almost equidistant from our jobs in Manhattan and our tiny apartment in Brooklyn. No matter where we wandered in the city, the silver towers were our locus. We were here. Living in the most important city in the world.

We watched both towers disappear, 10 seconds at a time, in a sickening free-fall that looked like slow motion.

We thought about the child we were going to have, and how we would explain this someday. (That someday is now; just two days ago, our 4-year-old son saw a photo of the wreckage in a newspaper and asked, "What happened?" My wife and I looked at each other, struggling for the words.) We thought about the world we were bringing him into.

The next morning, I walked down my block and took the 33 bus back to work. I was an editor at Philadelphia magazine then, and we decided to rush a story about the attacks in the next issue, which was October, even though it was about to ship. A quirk in our production schedule allowed us to be the first monthly magazine with a 9/11 story on its cover. (Across town, City Paper would also throw together an incredible last-minute issue that hit honor boxes within 48 hours of the attacks.)

I was in charge of a team of reporters who built an oral history that morning, told from the perspective of Philadelphians. Last week, I unearthed that issue and reread it for the first time in five years. The stories, which seemed raw and fresh while we reported them, now read horribly familiar. We've all become accustomed to the two kinds of stories that came out of that day: the near miss, and the unspeakable tragedy. There seemed to be nothing in between.

What strikes me now, though, looking at those pages, were the images we selected. Unabashedly patriotic images: children advertising "free flags" on a cardboard sign. A man with a swirling stars-and-stripes hardhat. An American flag jammed into the radio antenna slot of an old junker.

We had focused on the national pride and brotherhood that everybody seemed to be feeling. I had forgotten how fast that feeling had manifested itself.

Even my morning commute on the 33 bus was different. Pre-9/11, we were all just commuters who didn't see much reason to talk to one another, not first thing in the morning, for Christ's sake, jammed up against one another, trying to hold on to the rail until the bus opened its doors and we stumbled out onto Market Street. But after the attacks, the vibe was completely different. People would look you in the eye, and there would be no challenge. Just camaraderie. Just a feeling of yeah, I'm feeling it, too.

It was real. Can you remember it?

Did you enjoy it while it lasted?

And now, as we are about to commemorate the most horrific day in U.S. history, are you struck by its loss?

Feeling that maybe we've squandered all of that?

Or maybe, that our political leaders have squandered that in our good names?

It's been five long years since 9/11.

But collapse can happen so, so fast.

(duane@citypaper.net)