Tuesday, 25 September 2001 : "stories"

And then I see the second plane; the instant it is in view it's clear this is not an accident. The plane is moving toward the second tower counterintuitively; rather than avoiding the tower, it is determinedly bearing down, picking up speed.

I see the plane, and I see the plane crash into the building. I see the buildings burn, and I see the buildings fall down. I see imagery that until now did not exist in reality, only in the fiction of film. Seeing it with your own eye, in real time -- not on a screen, not protected by the frame of the television set, not in the communal darkness of movie theater -- seeing it like this is irreconcilable, like a hallucination, a psychotic break.

There is no place to put this experience, no folder in the mental hard drive that says "catastrophe." It is not something you want to remember, not something you want to forget.