The most awful part of this is: I don’t remember feeling anything. I couldn’t relate. I was eighteen years old and I’d never been to NYC. I didn’t know anyone there. I was the luckiest, most insulated kid on campus. I didn’t feel a thing—it was a TV disaster. I didn’t call my parents, or my sister, or any of my close friends. I knew where they all were.

I think for me, September 11 wasn’t an explosion so much as a steady, unstoppable leak: something that’s been seeping into my world ever since, in ways that are less and less ignorable. It takes a lot of effort, now, to remember when terrorism wasn’t something we talked about every day, and paranoia wasn’t simply the way things were.