I just watched the CBS 9/11 special on video.

I'm not upset, but rather in shock.

It's been so long, since I walked the lobby of 1 WTC. But on that day, it looked just as I remembered.

I used to attend an industry breakfast there every September, in one of at the rooms at the Windows on World. I checked my older entries and realized that the last one I attend was 9/8/00. I realized that I skipped the 2001 breakfast. I decided last August that I didn't feel like going. I have no idea if it was that morning, 9/11/02, or the day before or what.

I did a some major events there. Last summer, the head of catering there called me at work and asked me where I'd been. He reminded me that they owed me a free dinner for two, anytime I wanted to come.

I remember the friendly faces of the kitchen help and maintenance staff at Windows. I knew my way through the annals of those floors. I knew how the room dividers work. I remember their china patterns. I knew the secret cargo elevators that went straight to L. You needed a key card to ride them, they used to loan one to me.

I know that if the elevators weren't working, there is no way down from Windows. That's one of the reasons I hated going there. I used to pray in the elevator. Going up and going down, I would pray.

I don't want to know if that man is alive. I will not check, because if I don't know, then he is alive. In my mind he was on vacation, or off that day.

I protested CBS airing that special. After seeing it, I'm glad it aired. Now it's as unbelievable for the rest of the country and the world that two buildings of such magnitude, housing so many people, could fall in a tiny area with no room for buildings to fall.

The difference with Oklahoma was that the building wasn't as tall, and they had areas of land with which to sift through debris. If you watched the special, you saw that there is no open land on the lower tip of Manhattan. It's just built upward.

The firefighters in the special talked about the rumor of a third plane. I recorded that rumor in this journal on that day. We thought there was a third plane. Everything was chaos.

It looked similar to what it looked down there, where I was mid-town. The wind carried ash and debris and thousands of people either walked or ran. Some people cried, some tried to get through to loved ones on cell phones, but mostly everyone walked in silence.

I remember the silence so vividly, because I had never been with such a large group of people so silent.

The days after for the firemen, when they embraced each other, were the same for me, downtown at the designated search spots, embracing friends who gathered with their photos and medical records searching for friends, family and roommates.

One of the firemen makes a comment about how they were all family after that. *We* were all family after we searched together.

It's a strange situation and yet the epitome of New York.

When you move to New York, you leave your family and make a new family. Your friends, roommates and co-workers become your family. You spend holidays with them. You learn about life with them by struggling to make it here. It was almost fitting that on that day and the days after, people's families couldn't get into the city to search and the pseudo-families were left to look for theirs.

We all searched like we were looking for a brother or a sister. No one can ever question that. No one.

What happened on 9/11 may drive me away from here in a year or two. But it will never leave me.

I will never forget the family I made here. I will never forget the family that I lost in those two buildings.

I can't really describe what I'm feeling about September 11th. It's not sad or depressed. Some days I think, did it really happen? Did those buildings really burn up and come down with all of those people inside? Other days I remember with certainty that my friends died.

I guess the hardest part is not knowing what they experienced in their final hours. The only relief for me is that I suspect they died quickly. In seconds or minutes. Maybe they didn't know what was happening.

At least once a week for the last three weeks, I've read the name of a friend in the new list of confirmed dead.

It's a ritual I have, to read the list of newly identified each morning with a sense of detachment, like reading the sports scores from the night before. "Capriati won and Marc is confirmed dead." Next page.

This must sound callous to many of you, but for me, it's my life.

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