“Diary of a Tragedy” is a daily column written by New York City residents with Maine ties, who will share in coming days their experiences of the World Trade Center tragedy. Catherine Heins is a former NEWS reporter who covers business for the Japanese daily newspaper, Yomiuri Shimbun, in Manhattan.

By the end of the day, it didn’t need a name.

The sight of the tall towers crumbling like toy blocks, the billows of smoke chasing panicked office workers through the downtown streets like a scene out of a bad B-movie, had become simply “it.”

“I can’t believe it!” people exclaimed to passersby, who shook their heads in awe as a reply.

Even 24 hours after the catastrophe, with a giant gray cloud hovering at the tip of Manhattan for all to see, it hasn’t sunk in. The news anchors are begging press spokesmen for news – had they rescued six or seven missing firefighters? – when the unspoken reality lies hidden in the smoldering rubble. Thousands. Maybe tens of thousands. So who cares whether it’s six or seven?

We can grasp the reality that two 110-story towers were just stripped from our skyline, but no one can conceive of 10,000 people slain in the space of an hour, of body parts strewn in the streets, of office workers holding hands as they leaped from the 80th floor. Is it six or seven? We can work with that.

I first heard the news from a high school principal – a plane had hit the World Trade Center. My first thought was, wow. My second was whether I would have to cancel an interview in Connecticut scheduled for that afternoon. News can be so inconsiderate of a person’s previous plans.

Then I climbed the steps to the elevated subway platform and took in the view of the burning towers across the East River. The towers had not yet collapsed but it was already clear from the damage that thousands of lives had probably been lost.

A man was trying desperately to dial on his cell phone but the circuits were down.

“I was there at 8 this morning,” he said to all of us and nobody in particular. “I worked there.”

The Queens subway is a snapshot of the multi-ethnic fabric of New York and I wondered if the mainly working-class immigrants would feel like this attack was aimed at them or just at the power structure of their current home. No one else had any such doubts, as far as I could tell.

“It’s crazy, everywhere it’s crazy, where are you going to go?” a Latina woman asked me, as an Indian shared what few details he had with a Korean lady and a Chinese man. At Rockefeller Plaza, subway passengers were amazed, but animated. The scale of the tragedy simply didn’t make sense yet.

I was in London when the news broke that Princess Diana had been killed in a car crash in Paris and it felt much like that. People went about their daily business in the morning and absorbed the shock in the afternoon. The outpourings of grief didn’t really reach the streets until evening.

I was at work for more than 12 hours and I went home early. Because Rockefeller Plaza is a landmark, our building was being evacuated as a precaution but we stayed to monitor the press conferences, contact local hospitals and government agencies, and take calls from our reporters in the field.

I also answered about 50 e-mails and phone calls from friends as far away as Germany and Japan, asking if I was OK. I wanted to cry but that felt stupid. I didn’t know anyone who had died out of all the thousands, their phone machines and e-mail inboxes overflowing with similar messages that went unanswered.

What the hell did I have to cry about?

When I left the office 12 hours later, the streets were empty and in Times Square, subdued crowds stared at giant TV screens and the digital news ticker. The few people on the sidewalks scrutinized each other’s downcast faces as though searching for signs that the tragedy had struck home.

The silence felt like a blizzard was about to hit or a nuclear bomb just had. In my neighborhood, the 24-hour Kinko’s was closed but the bars and restaurants were packed with people hungry for human contact after a day inside gazing in increasing horror at the television.

Our reporter in lower Manhattan said that the place looked like a war zone, with the skeletons of buildings lining soot-covered streets and business documents snagged on the twisted metal debris.

Uptown, it felt like a war zone, too, even though the scenes of horror were far away. The store signs that said “Closed due to The Emergency” and the calls for blood donors posted at the subway station reminded me of the fragility of all this seeming normalcy.

A friend and I drank gin and tonics at a bar while five miles away, survivors trapped in the rubble were calling their loved ones on their cell phones to say goodbye. After being bombarded all day with reports from the surrounding TV screens, many waitresses had plopped down at their customers’ tables and sobbed.

“I’m like, thousands of people just died and this guy’s asking for more mayo,” said one waitress. “I mean, have some perspective.”

So I went home and cried, and it didn’t feel so stupid after all.