Note: this piece will meander between personal narrative and editorializing. Pardon the erratic format. September 11, 2001 was supposed to be just another ordinary day for me. I would get up, get showered and dressed, go to class, go to work, then come home and go to bed. I was a sophomore in college at the time. I lived with my mother, stepfather, and my younger sister and brother, in rural Indiana.

This is an unfinished book I worked on back in early 2005. I actually found it very promising, but as I got into it I wondered who would want to read such a relentlessly grim book, especially when I wasn’t planning on any kind of happy ending. In fact, the very process of writing it and planning it was depressing me, and I considered it an altogether unhealthy experience. I have thought about going back to it from time to time, but then I look at my notes and what I had written down, and it makes me sick to my stomach.