The Rubble Looks the Same No Matter What Fell

Some days are, to put it gently, a catastrophe. They arrive without warning, push everything off the table, and leave you standing in a completely different life than the one you woke up in. No aircraft required.

It’s a friend dying—someone who was sitting across from you in a bar the night before, laughing, telling you about his plans for Brazil, plans concrete enough that you’d already pictured the visit. Or it’s the slow, nausea-inducing realization that your long-term girlfriend has been developing a rather close relationship with her professor for quite some time now. Or it’s the answer to a question you should never have asked out loud.

These moments belong in the same category as watching the towers fall—not because the scale is equivalent, but because they share that quality of absolute before-and-after. You stand in the wreckage and the only coherent thought is: why me? As though the situation had ever suggested fairness was part of the arrangement. As though life had given any indication it was running an equitable operation at any point prior.

On the anniversary of something as collectively enormous as September 11th, I keep returning to the smaller collapses—the ones nobody marks with a moment of silence, that only the people directly hit even remember happened. They’re the same shape. The ash settles the same way. Somehow that’s the most honest thing I can say about either kind.