On that harrowing day, my father and stepmother watched the towers fall from the 27th floor windows of their Brooklyn Heights apartment with its stunning views of New York Harbor, the Brooklyn Bridge and Lower Manhattan.

What had once been the most beautiful urban view imaginable became the most horrifying.

I was over there today.   

"The lights aren’t in the right place," he told me. He’d seen them the night before when they were testing them.

"What do you mean?"

"They’re south of where the towers were," he said.

He was talking about the Tribute in Lights, the two blue lights that shoot up into the sky every September 11th now, a perfect memorial to the devastating loss that our city experienced on that day six years ago.

Nothing can describe that day. I spent the evening of September 11th, 2001 with a friend who’s  firefighter husband died at Ground Zero.

We were calling area hospitals looking for her husband. At midnight, a group of firefighters from Squad 1 in Park Slope showed up at the door. They were covered in dirt and dust and looked unbelivably tired. But they still held out hope that their fellow firefighters were alive. 

"There are voids down there," they told the group of us sitting in my friend’s Park Slope living room. "There are voids. The guys could be in one of those voids."

Voids. That’s what 9/11 created in this city. Friends, family and neighbors are missing. There’s a hole in the skyline where two towers used to be. A sense of "it can’t happen here" has left us forever.

We’re older now. If not wiser, at least we’ve come to understand that there are no exceptions to the violence that this world knows.