4.
You go every day to work at the library and can’t believe how quickly everyone else gets over it. You live with it all the time. Noise in your head, fear spreading through your bones. Your hands shake. But everyone else seems to move on to other things. Other things consume them. Their kids, their partners, their work. No one worries anymore about planes falling out of the sky, about towers collapsing. “It won’t happen here,” they say. “It won’t happen to me.”
But you, you can’t sleep. You have trouble swallowing food. Everything sticks in your throat. Your stomach constantly hurts. Loud noises make you duck. And your co-workers are noticing this. Looking strangely at you. Rolling their eyes. Looking at each other.
“Besides,” a co-worker says, trying to calm you one day, “look at all
