One friend tells me that each day, in her morning paper, she reads another biography of someone lost, and weeps. Another friend, a journalist who witnessed people jumping from the towers--writes “it's always there in my mind, in the shadows, just constantly there when my mind wanders, as if it were the reality and what my eyes see the dream.”

Part of my “survivor's guilt” is that my grief is somehow different than that of my friends back home. My American friend, in Rome with me during the time of the attack, tells me that he got into a fight with one of his best friends who suggested his pain was somehow lesser because he was not in New York at the time.

I am afraid. Of the war. Of being in Europe where we are warned that we may be the target of anti-American sentiment. And, of never knowing what these days have been like in the city that I love more than any other place in the world.