a letter from new york city

Megan Bumpus

A few months after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, I returned home from boarding school during Christmas break. New York City felt different to me. It had always been a place full of unfamiliar faces and many surprises. But this time, as I traveled on the subway from my apartment in the Bronx into Manhattan, I felt as though the people around me were angry, and fearful of their neighbors.

Then, last year, after finishing high school, I came back to live in the city again.

One day, on my way home from work in downtown Manhattan, I became aware of just how afraid I had been of my neighbors since 9/11. I had been staring at the floor of the subway train, trying to avoid looking anyone in the eye, instead of enjoying the ride home. At one point, I looked up at the people in the subway car. For the most part, no one looked worried about anything—everyone seemed pretty happy. One guy across from me was nodding his head to the beat of a hip-hop song, playing loudly into his headphones. On the other side of the train, two children were looking at a newspaper and reading out loud in Spanish while their father helped them sound out the difficult words.

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