my stomach churn. She had written words in the margins, notes to herself
for things to add in later. Smoke, she had written. Red. Black. Blue.
The buildings fell on a Tuesday. The sky was light blue that day.
I remember because I commented on it to Brooke seconds before it
happened. We were in a coffee shop.
“It’s really nice out. Look at the sky. The forecast called for rain.”
A low rumble, and suddenly people were running, and I was still
thinking about the sky and how blue it was.
We ran outside, leaving our coffees behind as we tried to look through
the people running the other way. I had never seen chaos like that
before. It was so loud I could barely hear myself think. Brooke didn’t say
anything, which was good, because I wouldn’t have been able to hear or
help her. Instead, she hid her face in my shoulder. I didn’t know what to
do. No one did. TVs showed coughing victims, screaming police officers,
firemen carrying people covered in red. And then there was us, standing
blocks away, speechless and unmoving, thinking about the sky and crying
for people we had never even met. We eventually turned and stumbled
home like drunken teenagers lost in an unfamiliar city, clinging to each
other and stepping over the cracks in the sidewalks.
The entire city breathed dirty air for weeks and covered their ears
everytime a taxi honked, convinced that every noise would be the last one
they would hear. I stopped going out at night, and went out only during
the day for work and food. Brooke had over twenty sick days saved up
from her job at the newspaper, and stayed home for the rest of that awful
September. On my way to work I would blast the radio at full-volume,
hoping to come across that one song that could take me back to summer,
when it was warm and our arms were tan and the dirt under everyone’s
fingernails was from falls off bikes, not falls from towers.
The Tuesday responsible for the city’s broken spirit was eleven days
away from the autumnal equinox. During the equinox, the poles are
aligned and the earth is pointed neither toward nor away from the sun.
It is perfectly balanced. Eleven days after the smoke rose and c