As I read the newspaper that week, I kept noticing that the people who jumped or fell from the towers were alternately referred to as “falling bodies” and “falling people.” “The body of a falling woman.” “The now-infamous falling man.” “For those down below, the bodies landed with sickening, almost explosive thuds. Many said it was raining bodies.” It’s as if, as they fell those ten seconds through the air at speeds nearing two hundred miles per hour, we watched their selves sheared from their bodies, we watched them passing for those ten seconds through the indeterminate state between body and person, so as to forever be etched in our consciousness as both. Falling bodies. Falling people.

In one article a firefighter named Maureen McArdle-Schulman said she felt like she was intruding on a sacrament as the bodies fell: “They were choosing to die and I was watching them and shouldn’t have been. So me and another guy turned away and looked at a wall and we could still hear them hit.” Bill Feehan, deputy chief of the fire department, shouted, “Don’t you have any human decency?” at a man filming jumpers with a video camera. The rupture of body and self is indecent, but also transcendent. It enters a realm of the sacred. It becomes obscene and impossible for another human to behold, like the Ark of the Covenant, which cannot be touched, or a god who cannot be looked at.

As I read through those 9/11 articles, I became fixated on the interchangeability of “body” and “person.” So much so that I looked up their definitions in the Oxford English Dictionary you kept on the shelf beside your old textbooks. It defined “body” as “the physical and mortal aspect of a person as opposed to the soul or the spirit,” and “person” as “a human being regarded as an individual.” What struck me was how the word “body” could be used to define both a living and a dead thing; a living or dead physical structure of bones, flesh, and organs. “The physical and mortal aspect of a person.” And because “body” referred to our physical structure without regard for its sentience, it could continue to refer to our physical structure once it had been emptied of the person. It was the ability of the word to denote either a living or a dead thing which unnerved me because it connoted ease, it connoted an almost imperceptible slippage between one state and another, as if the world might be filled with bodies in either state, moving fluidly between both states or inhabiting them at the same time.