Today was a really shitty day. I haven't had a really bad day in a while and I struggled internally with writing about it. Sometimes, the disadvantage to having an online diary that people read is that you feel a responsibility to censor yourself. I think about all of the problems in the world and in the grand landscape of problems, mine are minor.

What I decided tonight, is that my problems are my problems. And because they are mine, I shouldn't feel badly about writing them in my journal. I don't want this responsibility of keeping people's spirits up or keeping them entertained or allowing those feelings to overide what I want to say. I don't want to hide the facts because people I know read this.

This is my diary, these are my problems and here goes.

Today, was a really shitty day for me. I haven't been sleeping well and I suspect that's because I am so unhappy about having curtailed my social life for the past month in order to start on a financially responsible path in my life and save for my trip next week out of the country. I've also been trying to simplify my life, cleaning out closets and tossing material things that I feel clutter my space.

This economy makes me stressed and I'm not sleeping well. I'm overtired. I'm having a hard time focusing, like I told you, and lately, I've been having a hard time keeping the year straight. That happened again today. I'm not sure what's going on with me.

Last night, I sat down and attempted to write a letter to a friend who lost her husband in the WTC. They had been together since they were 15 and she is in her mid-30's. I wanted to tell her that I think about her everyday. I wanted to describe what it was like to see that photo of her and her husband on the 12th of September and how I gasped for air when I realized that he, too, was lost. I wanted to write that I noticed his flyer wasn't taped down all of the way so I stopped and double-taped all four sides all the way down on the WABC news van, running my index finger down the sides of the tape on the flyer for good measure. I wanted her to know that we added him to our lists and every hospital we visited, we inquired after him. I wanted to tell her that I didn't understand why any of this happened, that it didn't and doesn't make any sense at all and it probably never will and that I am so sorry for her loss...a loss I can only nominally imagine.

I wanted to apologize for not attending the service and explain that after searching for so many days without rest, my family brought me to my safe place and forced me to stop. They took me away from here and gave me a time out. I want her to know that I grieved for him not just on the days following 9/11, but each day since then, when I stop from my busy work and my mind remembers each of those people I knew or knew of who are also gone now. And I think of him, while I grieve and say a silent prayer that she maintains the strength to keep going.

But I didn't write any of this, because words can not possibly explain how often and with such intense emotion that I have thought of her and him in the last 99 days. There are no words.

This morning started off with me in tears. I picked up the paper and saw the fiance of one of the deceased people I was searching for after 9/11, on the front page of the paper prompting a follow up story on her inside.

Just that shot of her, brought me back 98 days to the search. It brought me back to messages from her during those days after 9/11, delivered by my rooommate, who was probably still in shock herself from watching two fiery commercial jets filled with passengers penetrate the steel buildings in front of her eyes. I read her words as I walked to the bus this morning and I cried, thinking about what she was saying....how she can still smell him and hear his voice. How she struggles during this holiday season when it feels like everyone has moved on and she is left without her very best friend.

I cried again at work, as I heard the newscasters that I analyze for 8 or more hours a day replay and discuss new and more graphic footage of the attack on 9/11 from a police heliocopter. I felt angry as the newscaster delivered the news that fewer people died than had originally projected because even as the numbers go down, none of my friends are coming back. I hear happiness in the voice of journalists, who are supposed to be unbiased, because they are thankful so many were spared. I don't feel like I have anything to be thankful for. More of my friends died than were spared.

My friend's husband's body hasn't been found or identified at all. How do you think that makes her feel? I know how it makes me feel. I search the papers and Internet each day to see if they may have even found a sliver of one of his bones so that we can have something concrete at the end of the day but we have nothing and that's the same for 4 missing friends.

I don't know what's worse, knowing or not knowing. My other friend received news that his girlfriend's body was found intact. She was on her way out of the building and was killed by falling debris. Now he sits and contemplates the "what if's"....What if she had gotten stuck in the turnstile in the subway that morning, would she be alive? What if she had missed the train that morning? What if she had gotten tired going down those stairs and decided to stop and rest for a minute? If she had kept going...

Finally this afternoon, I snapped. I saw that building falling again and in those images of smoke I saw in my mind's eye the flesh and bone of people I know. The violence of the images are overwhelming. The experience is overwhelming.

I think about what I've done in the last 100 days. I think about going from searching to comforting to grieving. Service after service. Mourners after mourners. Familiar faces on flyers that covered every inch of this city. Reporters calling my apartment and asking for interviews. E-mail prayers in my inbox and all of the new Foundations that have been created for people I used to hang out with. I wonder who that person was who went back to my job in my body and wrote corporate press statements about what the fuck happened on that day in corporate mumbo jumbo. That person who sat down and rethought plans and strategies like a person totally removed from the situation and then came home at night and stared a photos of people who died in that mess.

I think about the spirtual journey I went through, denouncing God and then returning to what I could salvage of my faith in God.

I wonder who I was functioning in this post-9/11 world, supporting friends with tremendous loss and telling others to move on. Get it together and move on. Let's all keep going. It was easy for me to say because I never stopped. I never stood still and absorbed the pain and the grief, I deflected it. I felt it and forced myself to move away from it like a child playing near a hot range.

I told everyone to stop dwelling on it because it's over and there's nothing we can do about it and to some degree I was right. It *is* over for those who died. But for those of us left, it has only just begun. We have been dealt new lives, not by choice but by consequence.

The reality is that I will never be that person I was before terrorists attacked and murdered my friends. Reality was me talking to the cousin of my friend A. this weekend, a senior at West Point, and suddenly realizing that a year from now he will be fighting a war and I may never see him again either.

Reality is the mastermind of this act disappearing forever and never paying for his crime at the hands of the justice that I would like to deliver to him personally. Reality is others like him training new people to kill more innocents.

Reality is bad days and vivid memories of deceased friends, that now cause cruel and inhumane pain for many, many people, including me.

Life today to me, means that death comes without sickness and age but by occupation and location. Introductions starting from 100 days past, bring sympathy and empathy from strangers. Three small words, New York City, bring questions, curiousity and concern.

A piece of paper lying in the street or a familiar expanse of a man's back can paralyze me in memories. A news report can overwhelm me and fill me with dispair.

A hug signifying greeting can evoke tears. A charitible gesture can make me feel powerless in the shadow of the grief that provoked it. A walk uphill can force me to ponder how I would fare in an emergency. Preparing for a trip provokes me to say good-bye with meaning to each person I know and love. A chance encounter with an old friend fills me with guilt and encourages me to catch up for longer than I would have before. I now sign off on e-mails with the word "Love," frequently.

Holidays seem pointless but for the chance to spend more time with family. Holiday cards become a chore; spaces once too short for the expanse of words I had to share now seem massive and impossible to fill so they sit blank in their pristine packaging on my table.

Shots of the buildings that once stood full of people stir up a myriad of emotions: nostalgia, anger, rage but what seems to stay with me after all of these fade is an immense, lingering sadness.

Overall, my new life that has emerged in the last 100 days is one of overlying sadness.

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