When it happens, you’re unprepared. Everyone is. You were never as safe as you believed. Normal ends here, in this moment. But you don’t know it at first. At first, you run.

Run.

Don’t look down, don’t look up. Just go go go until you stumble, stop, collide.

A hand grasps yours in a dark stairwell. You never know their face, but you cling to each other in that long breath between lives, because it is so much worse behind you (don’t look up), and because it is so much worse ahead (don’t look down).

This is how you survive.

Look ahead, straight ahead.

Thrust into the glaring light, your hand empty. All around you, a polyphony of sirens; screaming.

Don’t stop. Just go. Go. Go. Go.

Look straight—

• • • •

Ahead of you, a child dragging a long, plastic packing strip behind her. It is the only sound on a bridge heavy with leaving—the city’s first funeral march. So many people have never been so quiet, but in death . . .

In death in death in death.

Don’t look up at the swath of ghosts cutting across that blue, blue sky toward Brooklyn.

Don’t look down at the soot and paper and people drifting at your feet.

Look ahead, straight ahead.

A deserted parkway at rush hour, golden sun setting (it was such a beautiful day).

You’re startled when the birds still sing at dusk. At the pale moth gently whispering against your temple before it disappears into the dark. These, and all the innocences that follow, crack you open again and again and again.

Somehow, there is always something left to splinter.

This is how you survive.

• • • •

The first night you don’t sleep. You stare bleary eyed and bloodshot at whichever shellacked anchor dryly delivers the news.

The second night you flit and fall between what is outside and what is in your head—endless sirens, forever drawing closer, but never arriving.

On the third night, you dream of writing out a grocery list—tomatoes pasta bread cheese butter lettuce grapes salt—in careful, slow cursive. Numb till you wake.

After that, the dreams are of the lost places, frozen just as the dust drifted down from impact. Or as the top floors folded in and down, then out and down, and then just down and down and down.

You dream of the missing there, where they should be. Then there are just the spaces they left behind.

Then nothing at all.

• • • •

The jagged bones of the fallen claw at the sky. Skirting the remains, you pass them with dull eyes, an open crematory that smolders for weeks after. There is no rain. A mercy at first, and then a curse.

Hope flutters and fades against buildings and fences. No one has the heart to take them down, so they remain until the city absorbs them too.

• • • •

There is the one night, slinking behind you for miles before it finally strikes. Easy prey, you topple into your bleakest hour so swiftly you almost dive. But at the last second, you clutch at that slick black hole with bleeding nails. You want to let go, but without really understanding why, you choose to cling to that spot, howling in frustration and burning in a dark that sings to you.

Come morning, you climb.

This is how you survive.

• • • •

You count back to the last days of normal while you still remember. A week ago a month ago a year ago. The last time. The last time. You count and count and count and promise yourself you won’t forget the taste of before, until of course you do. You have to, this is how you survive.

• • • •

The first time you laugh it’s an assault, short and sharp, stabbing out from somewhere deep inside you. But you chase the feeling; follow it with too many borrowed cigarettes, too much cheap booze.

You wake slowly, adrift in the life you made for yourself while the rest of you was gone. The face you wear, only familiar around the edges, is reflected in the eyes of other survivors. There are parts of you that won’t start up again and pieces you can’t find, pieces buried out of necessity (don’t look down), buried so the rest of you could go on (don’t look up). But what is lost, is lost forever (look straight ahead). Just go. Go. Go. Go.

Rebuilding is forever incomplete, not just in the city.

This is how you survive. You count the days forward now.

And at night, when you sleep, you dream of the sea, instead of the sirens.