Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man - Bill Clegg

All evening I pretend to be tired - yawning and stretching, rubbing my eyes - hoping to encourage people to leave early.  I imagine the first hit and the bloom of exquisite calm it will bring and I quietly, invisibly, detest everyone in the apartment for being there.  

I feel next to nothing as I end our partnership, our business, my career.  I regard that nothing the same way you observe a cut on your finger just after accidentally slicing it with a knife but seconds before the blood appears.  For a moment it's like looking at someone else's finger, as if the cut you made has not broken your skin, the blood about to flow not your own. 

I leave Seth's and walk back to Sixth Avenus, where a throng of people on the corner are all looking south.  Something feels off balance and I have a brief flash of vertigo as I follow their gazes downtown to the now bland tumble of buildings there.  The towers have fallen.  An hour ago they stood there, on fire, billowing with smoke, and now they are gone.  They were just here, someone says as I try to locate where exactly in the skyline they used to rise from.  But in the cloud of soot and smoke that hangs above the blur of buildings that could be any city now, I can't remember where they once were, what it all looked like.  I have already forgotten.