Today Is a Sunny Day

In 2001, I lived on the twenty-fifth floor of an apartment building in New York’s East Village, and for the past ten years I have been trying to write about the events that occurred on 9/11.

The turning point of my life, I have written many times.

The first milestone of my adult life, I have written many more.

This is taken from the first time I tried, dated 13 September 2001:

There are two red gaping wounds coming out of a sight she knows all too well, those two tall towers that always stood higher than the rest, those boring monoliths she used to complain about seeing daily, never a fan of seventies architecture. Jon, her boyfriend, eventually came to her side and her next sentence was, ‘Turn on the television, something is happening.’ On NY1 she saw the exact same thing as out of her window – it was as if they were indistinguishable, The buildings were sparkling wildly, covered in a halo of glitter from all the broken glass.what was in front of her, what was filtered through the television, the reality of it as cinematic as...cinema. On the news they said many things but the errors stand out: the planes were private jets, there was a third plane somewhere in the NYC skyline about to come down, the DC mall was on fire. It was all unclear. They took out a disposable camera and took pictures for reasons they could not understand, but probably so they could just believe it was happening. The buildings were sparkling wildly, covered in a halo of glitter from all the broken glass.

I applied to grad school the month after, because I had to do something.

For an entire semester every story I workshopped started out about something else and ended up being about 9/11.

Here is a portion of a very flawed story about the impulse to turn back time:

She heads to a line, where a bunch of men, fat, in suits, big boss types, are cursing the stock market – of course – and she wants them to live. She turns to the donut man and asks for ‘one glazed original’...