I lived across the Hudson, in Jersey City, from 1996-2000.

But as Foreign Arts Correspondent for a magazine back home (Malaysia), spent my days in New York City, reviewing restaurants, plays, movies… A tough job but somebody had to do it.

I caught the PATH train from Grove Street and took either the World Trade Center or the 33rd Street route.

Most of the time, I’d head for the WTC and from there amble my way past the Brooklyn Bridge, through Chinatown where I’d grab a steamed pork bun, then onto Soho and the Village, where I spent most of my time when I didn’t have to be on Broadway. It was, as I said, a tough life.

Sometimes, I’d catch the PATH to the WTC and never leave.

It was a city unto itself. I often found myself passing an entire day at Borders, sifting through books and CDs.

I remember once bumping into a Sarah Ferguson book signing – something on nutrition. And as I threaded my way towards the stairs, caught a glimpse of red hair at a table and heard someone exclaim, “All this traffic for a pork-chop princess promoting a diet book? Go figure!” And I smiled and thought to myself, only in New York.

I remember the first time arriving at the WTC station and feeling shit scared as I looked up at those steep escalators that seemed to stretch on forever.

In addition to a fear of heights, I had visions of a fire or an electricity shortage and somehow being stuck halfway, then trampled to death by a faceless mass. But I got used to it and eventually, like every other commuter, found myself day dreaming on the way up or down.

A billboard of Connie Chung hovered above us. And once as I was getting off, a couple of punks heading the other way pointed at me and hollered, “Look everyone, it’s Connie Chung!”

Sometimes I worked late  and once, after downing one neat Glenfiddich (my drink of choice at the time) too many, with the kind folk whose bar I’d just reviewed, recall stumbling onto the sidewalk and gazing up at those towers with their twinkling office lights and thinking, Shit, it’s too damn far.

And so proceeded to the Holland Tunnel which seemed at the time the most logical thing to do. I thought if I could just breathe into my scarf the entire way, I might avoid death by fumes and manage a short cut to where I lived – which was literally just outside the tunnel, on the other side.

I barely made it to the entrance when a couple of cops showed up to inform me it was illegal (and not to mention nuts) to walk through the Holland Tunnel, to which I slurred, But I live just there, over the other side.

The cops were adamant – party poopers, and I trudged despondently back towards those towers with their twinkling lights, swearing at them for being so distant. Only the next day did it occur to me the PATH station at Bleecker would’ve been way quicker.

Sadly and reluctantly, I left New York in 2000, to join my husband at the time, who had received a job transfer to Italy. We were expecting a baby.

By 2001, I was back in Malaysia, a single mum and on 9/11/01, my baby was admitted to ICU at a hospital in Kuala Lumpur after months of severe vomiting.

Sitting on the hospital bed and trying to breastfeed a baby that refused to be fed, I clicked on the remote.

The first image to appear on the overhead TV was the first tower, on fire.

Huh, somebody’s finally made a movie of it, I muttered to myself.

As I tried to guess who would star in it – Sylvester Stallone? Bruce Willis? Keanu Reeves? – the phone rang. My father.

Did you see the news about The World Trade Center?

As the doctor arrived to explain why she thought my six-month-old required a 5-hour stomach operation, I gazed at the images flashing behind her, one after another. A nightmare unfolding that would soon change the world…

I felt sick. A somnambulist swirling in something that was all at once too real and un-real.

A plane as a bomb? My favorite city in ashes?

My baby in surgery? On the operating table for 5 hours?

It felt like the end of the world. In many ways, it was.

My thoughts raced to the people I knew who worked in and around the World Trade Center.

I recalled the underground station, those escalators, those twinkling lights. Tried not to picture all those people trapped, plunging to their deaths. Though that is all I could picture.

Later I discovered two friends and colleagues had died.

I haven’t returned to New York since.