Two years hence.

Tonight I watched The Center of the World, a documentary about the conception, construction, duration, and demise of the World Trade Center.

It was an obituary just in time—not too soon.

I watched in silence a plane fly into a building and explode.

The footage was long, long enough to see something amiss in the trajectory and to hope that the course might be corrected, even knowing that it wouldn't.

Then the next one came, a long slow silent arc.

This silence, withheld from us by the media and the president in the days following the attack, now had volume, and it gave me a moment to reflect.

It calmed me, and then I let it go.

I remembered racing to meet Andrew in the middle of Oregon that day.

We were new, and I pondered how the memory of the attack would evolve, ever including him even if my life did not.

I was aware, even then, that the tragedy heightened the false sense of sustenance imparted by new passion.

When the skies were empty and the world did not know what other plots were en route, we were comforted by proximity—for what is more worrisome for lovers than separation in uncertain times?

I drove for a day to reach him and the ever-solitude of the rural high desert.

We passed a week in a hollow without civilization.

Without TV.

We lived urgently for ourselves amid the greater unquiet.

That is what I remember, and it is still fervent.

Andrew came in late last night.

As is now usual, I woke long before he would begin to stir and started the day's tasks, returning to bed several times to find a permanency within the sweet hot atmosphere of his skin.