This Moment: September 11, 2011 7:17 A.M.

I woke from a dream of Ancient Persia. I can't remember specifics, but now I am visualizing the ruins of Persepolis, the magnificent city Alexander the Great reduced to rubble as retribution. Blood lust, I remember feeling this. The Code of Hammurabi and the Old Testament's eye for an eye.I am lying on new sheets, softer than any in recent memory. A small luxury. It is silent save for the white noise of a plane overhead. I opened the French doors to let in the season's crisp air, and the quiet static of the trees which sound like ocean waves advancing and retreating the shore. Now that I am fully awake it is impossible to stay in this moment. I remember the eerie silence after the unimaginable roar of the collapse, the city covered in ash, the sky littered with paper. And later, the streets lined with people holding images of the missing, their faces a collective Greek mask of anguish, their eyes so desperate and hopeful I couldn't hold their gaze and turned away, knowing full well they were on television. The small dog scratches his chin with his hind leg, then stands and stretches, dragging his hind quarters for one, two, three steps. He pads out of my bedroom into the living room and I hear his nails on the hardwood and then the kitchen tile. He returns to join the older dog on the rug and commences grooming. I watch the occasional cars pass and wonder about the drivers and their thoughts. A train signals it's arrival with a loud blast, and now is a comforting sound of business as usual heading down the tracks to some impossible future.