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freeway. That certainly put my little personal disappointments in perspective.
    Still, I flew back to New York deflated. A month—a whole month!—could have been used so productively. We could have had romantic dinners at Inn of the Seventh Ray in Topanga Canyon. We could have strolled around the Getty Museum and hiked the Santa Monica Mountains. We could have driven along the coast to the Santa Barbara wine country and stopped at the Hitching Post on the way back for a dinner of steak and grilled artichokes, downed with the restaurant’s own pinot noir. We could have fallen in love and planned a future together. I tried to shrug it off. His loss.
    I was still moping two weeks later when, on a clear, picture-perfect Tuesday morning in New York, the phone woke me up.
    â€œAre you okay?” It was my sister, calling from Puerto Rico.
    â€œYes, why?”
    â€œTurn on the TV and call me back.”
    I made it to the living room in time to watch the World Trade Center being swallowed up by dust. God help us. I sat frozen, weirdly fixated on how the towers fell. I don’t know how long it took me to come to and realize that on clear days I could see the buildings from my roof. I lived by the Hudson River on the top floor of a thirteen-floor co-op in Washington Heights. I raced one flight up the stairs. A few neighbors were already gathered on the southern side of the roof, watching the spectacle in silence.
    After I don’t know how long, I suddenly remembered. “Shit. The
Times
!” The newsroom must have been going nuts, and here I was, one of their metropolitan news reporters, watching the tragedy unfold in my bathrobe. I rushed down the stairs and got a strangely calm Metro deputy editor on the line.
    â€œJust find your way there,” he said, Zenlike.
    I dressed quickly and headed out on foot. With no car or bike to my name, and no yellow cabs or town cars in sight and all public transportation shut down, I would have to walk twelve miles south to get to what would soon become known as Ground Zero. I started walking but I never made it to the disaster site. Half a block from my apartment I saw small huddles of people on street corners talking, some of them crying. I opened my notebook and started taking notes. A few blocks south, a crowd of hundreds had gathered at the foot of the George Washington Bridge, many of them men and women in work clothes and holding briefcases.
    These commuters from New Jersey were not going to wait around for the city to shake itself back to normal. They had walked uptown and now wanted to walk some more, over the Hudson, to go back home to safety and hug a loved one tight. It all felt dreamlike. There was the bar with overhead TV sets packed with people drinking hard liquor at ten in the morning. There was the Arab convenience store owner in tense conversation with a customer about who had done it. Lines of residents crowded grocery stores and ATMs as if they were preparing for a hurricane. And I heard the name Osama bin Laden more than a few times out of New Yorkers’ lips from day one.
    I had not advanced even a mile when I called the newsroom again. “I’m still uptown, but there’s so much going on I think I should stay here.”
    â€œStart filing,” an editor said.
    Which I did, along with hundreds of my colleagues. Nothing went to waste. We put in the paper everything we heard and saw. Our vignettes ran under the headline: “A Day of Terror: The Voices; Personal Accounts of a Morning Rush That Became the Unthinkable.” After that day, we stayed on overdrive for months and months, in my case covering funerals and reporting and writing short profiles of the missing and the dead. Known as Portraits of Grief, these mini-profiles were solely based on the remembrances of relatives, friends, and coworkers. These mini-eulogies were not traditional journalism. We didn’t do much digging. But 9/11 was not a traditional story. We