For the first time in years, last night, I had a dream about a terrorist attack. I was sitting by some waterfront overlooking Manhattan with my mother, some friends, and several thousand others, and we watched a plane nosedive into the water, a billboard going along with it, and then the sky went black. Manhattan went black. A few other things happened—screaming, scattering, looting—which I remember in varying levels of detail, mostly barely anything at all. But the image of watching every light in Manhattan become extinguished one by one, as if by flipping one big switch or snuffing one gigantic candle, then a blackness so evil descending onto the daytime sky to silence the sun—that’s the image I can’t stop thinking about this morning, even hours since I woke.
I was a few days into my freshman year of high school in New York on 9/11. After dismissal, I walked to Long Island Sound, looked across the water, and watched the plumes of smoke. I think about this from time to time, mostly at random, occasionally when I get off the train at Fulton Street, but not often. Part of being a lifelong New Yorker has, to me, meant learning the skill of stifling without forgetting. Fear is a tradeoff; you either live in fear, or you live in New York. You can’t have both. So, the moment when something comes up and you can’t control it—like a dream—your system is shocked until you make it fade again.
This morning, from sleep to wake to fourteen stops on the F train from Brooklyn to Bryant Park, my system has been shocked. But it will fade, because it must.
M
