kfitz

Today, Of Course

Night before last (meaning Monday night, the 9th), I watched Showtime’s airing of Reflections from Ground Zero, a series of nine short films produced by graduate students from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. I’m not sure whether it was any of the films themselves, or rather the generally haunting remembrances, or my past life at NYU, or my more personal and present requirement to address the date in a suitably professorial manner (at a faculty-student luncheon at which I’m to appear on an official panel) — whatever the cause, night before last (meaning, as I write pre-sleep, last night) I dreamed of the World Trade Center, over and over.

Dreamed of watching it come down, powerless on the wrong side of the country and on the wrong side of the television screen. Dreamed of searching for a way off of the 104th floor. Dreamed of debris, and panic, and evacuations.

Today is a day I’d rather not acknowledge — rather not, in fact, experience. Rather ignore from a safe spot, with the covers pulled securely over my head. I don’t suppose, though, that any of us have that luxury any more, and that the luxury of covers-over-head is part of what got us into this mess in the first place.

I don’t have anything suitably professorial to greet the day with, no guidance for my students, or even, at a much baser level, for myself.

What I do have is a need to reach out. A quick message, then, for the friends I left in New York, now a shocking four years ago: I miss you more today than ever.

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