This afternoon I hate Barnes & Noble -- with its smug coziness on a gray and drizzling day, and the lingering aroma of lattes and cappucinos. I hate the opera music, the mournful voice of a woman singing just over my head. Most of all I hate the books about the towers. They follow me wherever I turn: big coffee table books, pamphlets on what to do if you are hijacked, introductions to Islam, reflections on 9/11: I will wrap them all into this tidy category of tower books, because most of them feature the towers. They are gleaming in the sunlight of some long ago morning, or, more frequently, in various stages of destruction.

I just want to read a book. It's a sleepy Sunday afternoon and I want to relax. But now I close my eyes and they are still there. Now the tears are in my eyes, but if I keep them open very wide, not really focusing on anything, maybe they'll dry. Now I'm in the bathroom scribbling these words because not even two damn whole hours have managed to tick off the clock without being reminded. I don't need these books. I don't need sentiments from strangers. My own recollections are punishment enough.

Dear God I never want to forget. And I never want to be the way I was before that day -- sleeping through life, only vaguely aware of what matters -- but sometimes I wish, and I wish for this all to have been just a long and amazingly detailed dream. And I will wake up and on the news they will say that a major terrorist plot has been avoided, discovered, interrupted, and on that day all the planes fly, and the towers still stand, and people, so many people, LIVE, and I've never heard of Lisa Beamer, and Ground Zero isn't a place, and the New York skyline is as beautiful as it always was, as it glittered in the poster that hung on my wall when I was in high school.

I used to just lie on my bed and stare at it sometimes. Those moments seem decades removed from the echoes of this bathroom, where everyone is washing their hands and living their lives, but I'm stalled briefly while I pour out these words, take a breath, and start again.

Winter 2002