I feel everything at full volume.
The love.
The guilt.
The fear.
The regret.
I don’t think I’m dying—but I’ve never been more aware that Icould.
That anyone could.
I look around at the faces near me—ashen, stunned, strangers clutching each other like they’ve known one another forever—and something inside me shifts, cracks, opens.
All the things I thought were emergencies before—arguments, deadlines, jealousy, control—shrink down to their true size.
Insignificant.
Dangerous only because I let them be.
I don’t know what comes next.
I don’t know how to get home.
I don’t know who’s alive.
I don’t know how to make the phones work or how to stop my hands from shaking.
But I know this, with a certainty that lands hard in my bones:
If I survive this?—
if I walk out of this city—I’m living my best life. Loving hard and holding my loved ones harder.
Someone starts crying.
Someone else says, “It must be an accident. It has to be.”
I believe that for about thirty seconds.
Then the second plane hits.
This time there’s no confusion. No room for explanation.
This is not a mistake.
The sound cracks something open in me. The force of it vibrates through the pavement, through my shoes, into my bones. People are screaming now. Sirens wail from every direction, overlapping, frantic, useless against the scale of it.
My stomach drops.
Everything else—Sage, work, my life, my stupid heartbreak—shrinks into nothing.
I think:I need to get out of here.
Then I think:I can’t just leave.
I don’t know when I start moving toward it instead of away. I just do.
