Once upon a time, I stood at the full-wall kitchen window in my West Village office building and watched two planes crash into towers a mile downtown. I watched debris fall and gradually realized that it was not all pieces of plane and glass. I watched those towers pancake to the ground, the vision painfully surreal to process.
I walked the eighty blocks back to my apartment, tuned the radio to NPR, and slumped down onto the kitchen floor. An hour later, unable to sit with my grief, I threw on my sneakers and ran. Uptown and downtown, I would have looped the bridges had they not been closed. I couldn’t stop running; I needed to feel my heart beat. And with every beat, I wondered how many other hearts had stopped.
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object of memory 