i heart new york.

On September 21, 2001, I had my first real job interview.

It was the first time I had been back to Manhattan since the towers' collapse. I'd been watching the news broadcasts, volunteering at the Staten Island port where the rescue workers went for rest and food, living in the wake of the devastating events without work or school to distract me. But I hadn't yet crossed the river to the city, and truth be told, when my future boss called me on September 20 and asked if I'd like to come in for an interview the next day, I may have said yes instantaneously, but I was dreading the journey.

The closest I had come to the attack site was the day after the tragedy, when my mother and I silently drove to the tip of Staten Island. On normal days ferries would be shuffling in and out of port, but that day it was still. We stood at an iron railing and watched our city smoke. We tried to accept that the cloud would clear, and the towers would still be missing.

By the end of that week, we had signed up at the Staten Island Home Port, taking the only shift available to work - 4 through 8am. We cooked food and made beds, filled coffee cups and served breakfast for the firemen, policemen and military using the port as a place of respite before heading back to the war zone. We wrapped thousands of packages for the servicepeople - one type of which held a gas mask, rubber gloves and Q-tips soaked in Vaseline, which when placed in the nose kept the smell and pollution of the rubble from overpowering. We spoke with, and cried with, grown men the size of linebackers, who hung their heads over their scrambled eggs as they prepared for the day ahead. I spoke to a chaplain who told us about a fireman who had been avoiding his son since the tragedy because he didn't want him to see his Daddy cry. Even the dogs (who spent the day sniffing out remains at the Fresh Kills Landfill, where the towers now reside) came back to the facility drooping, limping, lacking the life and energy to even lift their heads when petted. We watched as the walls filled up with drawings from children, as the cards came pouring in, as restaurant after restaurant showed up with donations of food that could feed a small country, as retail stores dropped off helmets, boots, blankets, clothes. We watched as we started to trudge toward recovery. We may not have been moving debris or giving blood - but each coffee cup was important, and each serviceperson got a smile before they went back to the city.

At home, we huddled. We had made it past those awful first moments, and that was everything. A string of miracles that on any other day would be simply routine had delivered my family home to me. My sister, usually on the train right under the WTC at 8:48, had decided at 8:30 to do an errand in the morning rather than afternoon – and that errand may have saved her life. My father, usually in and around downtown Manhattan every day, arrived back in our house shortly after the second plane went into the tower. I had been alone, phones cut off, watching and crying and trying desperately to find someone on Instant Messenger who could get in touch with someone I knew. The door to my house opened, my father shouted, "Meliss?" and I screamed, nearly knocking him over from the force with which I hugged him. Then we just watched, open-mouthed and pale, wordless and speechless.

We got through that first week by that same speechless watch, by hugging and holding and crying. And I never left the island, even though my mother and sister walked down to the Trade Center a few days after, walked down to say their prayers over the site and came back covered in ash, with some burnt paper from Cantor Fitzgerald in their hands. We collected memorials – a high school friend of my sister’s, an uncle of our very good friend, a professor from Georgetown. All in all, we were monumentally blessed, and we knew it.

But I had already consigned myself to never, ever finding a job. If I had thought the market was bad before September 11, surely it was nothing to what it was afterwards – and I didn’t really care. I didn’t put out a single resume after that day, though I’d send dozens the week before. And the possibility of this job, my job at MTV Networks, was all but forgotten to me – I’d sent the resume in at least two months prior and hadn't really thought about it for a few weeks. I was content without work, though; I wanted to be with my family and enjoy my time home, stop the mad search for success.

And then I got the phone call. "Can you come in tomorrow?" The ambition in me jumped to say yes, and the next day I was on the ferry, crossing the chasm for the first time since the attacks.

I stood on the deck facing Manhattan – alone .The ferry was full, but everyone was inside the boat, a movement of avoidance I've never seen before. The ruins were still smoldering. I couldn’t see the heap itself – just a wall of buildings that were not the Twin Towers, and smoke.

As we got closer to the mainland, more people came out from the belly of the boat. They filed out until there was no more room, and we were all staring straight ahead at the approaching city. From our left, the Statue of Liberty came into view. Everyone turned his or her head toward it in one silent movement, and watched her in her unblinking, defiant stance, until she disappeared behind the scope of our vision.

When I turned back, the boat had shifted, and we were close. I smelled burnt…burnt something. There in front of me was the pyre, the funereal mass of steel and flesh. I wasn’t prepared for the image, and I staggered. I held onto the boat for support, and noticed a few others doing the same. I thought for a moment I would vomit.

I arrived in New York City on that day — the day on which I would begin my professional career, the day on which I got off the island and stepped right into the real New York at its most vulnerable time, the day on which I realized that not only does life go on but you have to go on with it — not expecting my life to change, and certainly not expecting an event that has wrought so much pain and suffering to watermark the very beginning of my real life. But it has, and I can’t help but feel special for the welcome. I walked into New York at the edge of its new consciousness, and became part of this wonderful city as I became truly conscious of the real world.

I've loved this city my whole life. And now, I'm in love with it. I heart New York.