Hey everybody,

Twenty-five years ago, I stood on Greenwich Street next to Tim Colby, watching the first tower burn.

Then we heard a screaming sound and the ground shook.

The second plane had just hit the World Trade Center.

The Amex, where Tim and I got our start, sat a little over a block from the towers. Heck, I used to come in on the PATH train, get off at the World Trade Center and walk to work.

I did it that morning.

I don't think I've ever written about it, and I frankly hate talking about it. That day changed me forever. I'm not going to dig into what the rest of my morning looked like, but I'll make one comment.

The sound of the towers falling that you hear on TV doesn't match what I heard. It sounded more like a giant cracking sound.

That sound still haunts me.

I don't like pictures of the towers. I loathe watching the events. Most of the time I keep what happened, and my emotions, locked away in a vault.

This past August, my wife and I visited New York. You might have seen the video I recorded in front of the old Amex building. It sits steps from the 9/11 Memorial, and with my wife's support, I decided to go see it.

EVERYONE should go to the memorial and the museum, especially kids who were too young or not yet born when it happened.

The first thing you see when you walk into the museum: images of people looking up at the towers as they burned.

That hit me, because that was me.

The room with the images of everyone who died hit me just as hard. I knew a couple of people in the towers tangentially, but I knew one woman decently well.

She worked at Cantor. Before that, she worked at RBC on the bond desk, directly across from my desk. I liked her because she actually acknowledged my existence and took the time to teach me a couple of things about the bond market.

I hadn't seen an image of her in over 20 years. That was hard. I can't imagine what her family went through, and likely still goes through to this day.

Leaving the museum didn't feel as cathartic as I'd hoped, but it felt like a step in the right direction toward dealing with my emotions from that day.

I'll leave you with two tidbits about that day, one a little funny and one not so much.

My girlfriend at the time had an aunt who worked in Tower 1. She was in the lavatory when the plane hit.

The water in the toilet exploded upward like someone had dropped a cherry bomb in it. That was the one part she could laugh about.

The other: after the towers fell, huge amounts of paper floated around. I was walking to one of the piers to get evacuated out of Manhattan when a piece of paper almost landed in my hands.

I looked at it. It was part of a fire insurance policy. I don't know why it struck me, but it did.

I hung on to that paper and still have it in my files.

We didn't go back to the Amex for over three weeks. When we all got back, every one of my coworkers came back different, more serious.

If you're ever at an Option Pit event or in one of our live rooms, feel free to ask me about it. I think talking about what happened helps me a bit.

Thank you for taking the time to read a little bit about my story from that day.

Your only option,

Mark Sebastian