Lone Runner

Not every reminder of 11 September 2001 is a photograph of the towers. Some of them were ordinary cars that stayed in an ordinary lot. The old Giants Stadium commuter park-and-ride in the Meadowlands filled that morning the way it always had. People left vehicles there, took the bus into Manhattan, and went to work. After the attacks, some of those cars did not move. Their owners did not come back to claim them. For days and weeks the lot held that fact in metal and glass: a space reserved for a person who would not need it again. The stadium is gone, now. The lot is gone. The cars were towed long ago. Twenty-five years later the number still used for those killed that day is 2,977, and the families those deaths remade are still here. The Meadowlands picture is only one place where absence had a parking space.