that way.
After the attack, Brooke didn’t write as much. I found crumbled up
paper in the trashcan that I assumed was her work, given up on and
thrown away. She quit her job, claiming that it wasn’t right for her. She
would often just stand at the window and look down onto the street,
not saying anything. I doubted she was seeing anything, either. I tried to
get her to come with me, anywhere. To come outside and see that it was
okay. But she never did, and I stopped trying.
I set the pages down, wanting to relive those memories even less.
Even after all these years, she still couldn’t write about it. I closed my eyes
and thought about before, before the city stopped moving and Brooke
stopped being Brooke.
“You’re made of stardust,” I said to her one night.
“What a nice thing to say,” she whispered as she ran her thumb over
my knuckles.
We were in the park, two days before the towers fell. She listened
as I pointed out stars and constellations, pointing where I pointed and
repeating every name I said. I told her about all of the people in the
world, all of the stars in the galaxies, all of the galaxies in the Universe.
Think about it, I said. She said, yes, and you’re here, at this very spot,
with me. Think about that.
We didn’t talk after that. I guess we were both thinking.
She broke the silence by asking about what we were pointing to.
“What happens to stars when they die?”
“275 million stars are born every day. Then they’ll die and make 275
million people. Like you and me and everyone.”
I doubt she wrote about the morning my voice was completely gone
from the night before, yelling at her and throwing around the word
“Agoraphobic.” Or the time she had broken down and cried in the
middle of the grocery store because we had been too far from home for
too long. Or the times she would watch me step onto the balcony of
our new apartment and pretend to remember what the stars looked like
without the radiance of the city lights illuminating the sky and cancelling
out the distant glow from millions of light years away. Or the countless
138