i posted the next paragraph on bluishorange in response to someone’s comment about the manhattan skyline being forever changed:

the skyline is unimportant. i think about the people who spent their last moments trying to get out of the buildings, perhaps squeezing into packed, smokey stairwells. or the people whose last few terror-filled minutes of life were spent flying low over the new york cityscape. these were moms and dads, children and babies, dammit. young interns, their careers ahead of them, security guards, holding down two jobs to feed a large family, saints and pricks, smooth and wrinkled, beautiful and ugly, laborers and white-collar office staff, somebody’s girlfriend, somebody’s fiance, somebody’s grandpa, somebody’s son or daughter.

no more.