Heh. “Highschool”. I remember driving down the road and seeing cars abandoned in the middle of an intersection, doors open and all, just outside a popular diner on the corner. The crowd was eerily silent, packed around the TVs inside that normally showed the weather, sports, what have you. When I followed suit, a stranger turned to me and said “They hit the Twin Towers!” while behind him, a screen showed the second plane impacting.

That was a couple years postgraduate, and everything changed that day. Nothing seemed real anymore, and at the same time, everything mattered — down to a debilitating granular scale. I called a colleague who had just left for NYC on a photog trip, and he didn’t pick up. A few days later, be called back, frantic and babbling about some crazy shot he got just walking around town on his own. It was too be TIME’s cover.