9th grade history class, the news radio on, the nervous laughter. I don’t even believe in God but I remember praying. The halls of this public school are howling. I have long said I hate New York but I love New Yorkers and oh god Mike and Joe work on that block. The shine of the hallway floor because how can you look at anyone. 75 miles out and the phones don’t work. We walk the halls. I don’t remember getting home.

Standing in my childhood bedroom at the window. The light is slanting through curtains, blue, striped. My uncle’s voice is on the phone and I have never heard him so quiet. We don’t talk about it much, mostly I just need the telephone as proof that he has not turned into broken cinderblocks, ash, smoking shards of steel. We hang up.

In my memory there is a keening sound, a shrieking absence, a teenaged sobbing. Oh god what a child I was and oh god how time passes. So much of it. But still the wound aches. I smoked a joint by the river near the rubble that is no longer rubble with an anarchist named Myke with a y, slept on a blanket on the ground in his arms in its sight. I can never seem to remember where it is. Time goes on. Today is a Tuesday, the start of my second week of grad school, the day an album comes out, a day I don’t have rehearsal, a day I will try not to text someone I like a little too much, a day I will think about mopping the floors but probably won’t. But this day and that hang in the air, always and already and complete, humming at their certain frequency forever. Our lives like light, passing through the prism of the time before. 

I didn’t mean to write about this today, but I woke up bolt upright before 5am this morning in a panic. I don’t know why. Perhaps memory didn’t want me to sleep.