she’d expected to see normal life, bustling on indifferently. Here is how Zedeño describes this powerful presumption that the trouble was limited to her immediate vicinity, which psychologists call the “illusion of centrality”: When you’re in trauma, the mind says, this is a very local problem. This is your little world, and everything outside is fine. It can’t afford to say that everything outside is horrible. The sound that I heard on the seventy-third floor should have told me, this is bad. The feeling of the building shaking should have told me, this is bad. The explosion when I was on the
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