Here's what I learned tonight.

No matter what anyone thinks they feel for me, they just don't know.

I'm coming to terms with what happened. On 9/11, I was everyone's rock. I told them everything was going to be okay. I told Gingi, who was in D.C., that we were going to have a BBQ. I told people at work that my friends and their friends were going to be okay, and now I am left with the fact that my friends are not okay. They are dead. And while I sent e-mails telling everyone who wasn't here to remain calm, people I knew were dying. I saw it on TV. I watched them die.

Tonight I cried, because instead of getting in a taxi as soon as I heard about the first plane and rushing downtown, I sent e-mails about having a BBQ and smoked cigarettes. I was angry at the people who got upset.

What kind of person am I? I told my roommmate, who was seeing a guy in 2 WTC who had left us a message on our machine that Monday, the night before, while we were watching a movie. I screened him, telling her not to pick up. I told her not to pick up. That may have been the last social call he made. He was calling to let her know he was in for a party that Thursday.

I also asked my parents to come get me during those days after 9/11 and they didn't come. They said I needed to stay. I was on the phone with my brother and mother, hysterically crying after spending 5 hours at the Medical Examiner's office and they told me that I was needed here.

I don't ask for help. Never. In my life. That day I asked, and they didn't help. I didn't think about that until my roommate, looking at me shocked tonight, said, "You asked for help?? That's a big deal for you, you never ask." "Yes," I said. "And they told me to stay."

My father never even called me that week. He and I didn't speak for weeks. Not for weeks.

And I know that he had his own baggage to deal with because he knew my friend's husband. But he never called and said, I'm coming to help or I'm coming to get you.

What the fuck?

I went to tell the deceased family the bad news a week after the search, 40 minutes from my parents. My parents went to their summer home with my brother. They didn't even come to see me. My friend's parents stayed home Vermont to care for us.

What the fuck is that?

What. The. Fuck.

When I told my brother that I couldn't take it (with my mom on conference call), my brother calmly told me that he imagined it was bad for me, but that I needed to understand what it was like for him, 1 of 60 with the family of the missing in Philly. And I was reverently silent at that and my mother was silent. She never said a word. She never defended me.

I defended him in the dog days after that, for leaving the family and going to the shore. "He grieves differently," I said.

But while I was defending him, I was here, alone, as they had left me.

Now I am angry. And I want to know, what about me? What about my experience? What about what I saw? No one knows, what I saw. No one knows what it's like for me. It's not a torn flag or firefighters. It's knowing the hospitals in this city inside out. It's never going down First Avenue again without thinking about the morgue at NYU Medical Center where we went to identify body parts.

It's queuing up at the designated spots with all of those other people, waiting to check the lists of the confirmed alive and the confirmed dead. Hugging people I knew in line doing the same thing, picking from those cardboxes held by volunteers to find a bottle of water and an apple.

To be honest, I don't think about my life anymore in the future sense. I think about living. Day by day. Some days, I think about ending it all. I think about how it easy it would be to join my friends in the afterlife. No more clients and agency bullshit. No more trying to make everyone happy. No more having to work to find someone to settle down with and make a life.

I feel tired. Unbelievably tired.

Other times, less frequently, I feel angry. I want to fight the world. I want to cut my head off and hold it above me and say to the world, "Here! Is this what you want?! Does this make you understand the pain?"

The whole thing was so civilized. Press conferences and "God Bless America" marquees and US flags. I want to rip and burn one of those flags and scream uncontrollably, "Don't you know? Don't you know what has happened? Don't you know that I watched the world end and wrote about it staring at a Gold Star banner?"

Does anyone know how fucked up I am?

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