It's the mornings that are particularly difficult. Later in the day I do much better; I laugh and joke and feel like myself.

And then there's night. Night isn't good to me. As I try to sleep, my thoughts scream in my head, thoughts shouting over thoughts like layering images in photoshop. Like laying text over text so that all you see are black outlines of letters over letters, indistinguishable. If I can sleep, then it's restless or there are nightmares. This week I dreamt that I was flying into a flooding Prague. Friends and family were screaming at me as I left to board the plane, telling me that I was leaving for disaster, that I would be killed by the floods, but I boarded regardless, for no reason.

The mornings. It's not hard to get out of bed or to get dressed. It's always the morning paper. This week it was the tale of the air traffic controllers in USA Today. Today it was the death of Neal Travis. Reading these things triggers something that makes me cry. No, not cry, sob. My body silently shakes for a few seconds each morning as I ride the bus to work.

Earlier this week, it wasn't even the paper, but two small boys with their father who entered the bus. They came to the back of the bus and one of the little boys looked up to me trepidaciously, unsure if he could ask me to move my bag so that he could sit. He must have been 4 years old. I smiled at him and put my bag on my lap so that he could sit and I suddenly realized that I was going to start sobbing again for no reason. I quickly turned my head to stare out of the window before the child saw me but his father had already seen. He looked at me sadly and rubbed his hand on his son's head as if to protect him from my grief. It felt so wrong to sit next to this child because I feel tainted; I felt like the pores of my skin held death and destruction and that children should be protected from me, like a leper.

For an hour or more each day, I focus on completing my goals for the charity fundraising event we are creating for my friend's husband who died in the WTC. I write letters to companies I know asking for donations and in these letters, I tell them each a little bit about him and how he is revelent to their business. I describe the music he listened to and tell them about his favorite golfers in the hope that by humanizing him it will strike a chord and they will give money in his name so that we can help underprivileged children with that money.

Each day, I cry for a little while as I write these letters. I have been working for 5 days to write a media alert for our event, a task that would normally require an hour of my time, because when I pull up the document, I am lost in the headline where I read his name and the words "Area Man September 11th Victim."

I become frustrated with this document that drags on and on and I call someone else on the committee for ideas of what to write and together on the phone we distract each other with other things so that by the time the call is finished, we have successfully avoided the task together.

I am irritated by the media coverage that is emerging because I only read about families and survivors and victims and nowhere do I read about people like me with friends who were killed and were trapped on this island for days while we were shut off from the rest of the world and it was up to friends like me to search for the missing.

Those first days...it wasn't family here walking this island nearly comatose with fear and insomnia, through air thick with ashes and the stench of death; it was me and others like me searching for friends and roommates. We were the ones staring at excel spreadsheets of body parts trying to identify our friends. We were the ones who made it past Canal Street to stare at the cars covered in white soot whose owners would never be coming back to retrieve them. Most wives and children and families were in New Jersey and Long Island and Westchester.

We couldn't escape this island if we had wanted to so we assumed the role of the family. We filed reports for the missing. We had their social security numbers, we knew every scar on their body and every bone they had ever broken.

We reported in to the families. We broke the news, or lack of news on these people over excruciating phone conversations. And then we stayed here and picked up our lives as if we had been on a simple leave of absence from work.

It wasn't just me. It was thousands of other residents of Manhattan. We all pinch hit and in doing so, got burnt as the fires continued to burn around us.

But the media doesn't talk about us. It's like we don't exist. Like we were phantoms or some type of Highway to Heaven legion of angels sent to do this job and then expected to reassume our proper roles.

In the mornings I listen to Alan Alda's compassionate voice in the radio as he advertises the Liberty Project, a source offering free counseling for families and businesses grieving over Sept. 11th. I wait for Alan Alda to welcome me to free counseling. I wait for him to invite anyone who searched hospitals and armories for friends. He does not invite me.

I feel displaced, like my grief is inappropriate. That among the fiances and wives and children and parents and brothers and sisters and survivors, there is no room for my pain. I am a trivality to an outsider.

Putting my grief aside was working very well for me for so long, I don't know what to do with it now. I don't know why it's here when I so carefully put it away, in a little box hidden in the back of my brain.

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