I watch the news. I watch the news a lot now. My relationship with Peter Jennings is bordering on the obscene. My eyes are thirsty for pictures of my town and my people, desperate to try to understand what it could possibly be like there now.

I don't know this New York. I wasn't there on Tuesday. I watched my hometown undergo the worst, most horrifying attack in American history, while paralyzed in front of my couch in West Hollywood, powerless to do anything but hit redial for six hours as I frantically tried to get in touch with my family and friends in Manhattan.

Until last Tuesday, I was working on a novel about the existential crises of three, post-Ivy League, Manhattan twenty-somethings. How ridiculous. How embarrassing. How utterly outdated it seems now. Suddenly, everything besides death and love is pointless, my novel so trivial it seems disgusting, my writing so meaningless, it seems a joke.

Last Monday's perception of New York is as destroyed as the magnificent towers that were its icon. A reminiscent glimpse of New York before this war, before the picture of savvy dressed, Cosmopolitan drinkers was replaced by one of somber rescue workers, before the groanings of the Seinfeld and Sex and the City prototypes were overshadowed by the tears of thousands in Union Square, before audacious sophistication gave way to awed fear. A novel about that New York could only be a period piece now.

Things in LA just don't seem very important anymore. Nothing, other than this seems important at all. And, knowing that, it's very hard to be in California. Although I have resided here a year and a half now, it is not my home.

But is New York?

It is no longer the city in which I was born and bred, had my first kiss, my first job, my first apartment. It is no longer the New York where I was a child and became an adult. It is no longer the New York which is so closely tied to my identity.

Everything and everyone is different. My mother tells me even her dogs are altered, hiding under the bed, not playful or hungry. The existential angst of the twenty-somethings I write about, drawn from my own life and the lives of my New York friends is as extinct as our complacency.

What is existential angst when you've just had to fight for your very existence?

Abby, at jury duty downtown, witnessed people leaping to their deaths, yards in front of her face, only to discover, nine hours later, the disappearance of an ex-boyfriend.

Stacy, who recently moved with her boyfriend, Peter, to an apartment a block and a half from ground zero, almost died as the towers came down - keeping seconds ahead of the smoke and debris until she reached safety on a crosstown bus. Her building will probably be condemned, but she has never felt more fortunate.

Jill and Emily watched in horror from their roof in Soho as the second airplane hit and our skyline crumbled.

Megan speaks of leaving her office in midtown to head home in a sea of smoke and hysteria, of looking south and seeing nothing where the towers once stood.

Everyone knows someone who has died, someone they loved, or once loved, or a loved one loved who is now gone. And the news keeps trickling in.

The father of a Hebrew School classmate, a neighbor, a family friend.

Late Thursday night, I discovered that Raina, a friend of mine from college who I have - for the silly, irresponsible reasons that people do - fallen out of touch with, lost her husband. She is twenty-seven years old.

I don't know if I can still consider myself a New Yorker anymore. Maybe I will be just as much an alien there as I am here. I haven't been through what they've been through, I haven't had smoke sting my eyes and fear creep in my veins. I haven't had to show ID to go to my apartment, or been rendered homeless by an attack. I haven't jumped every time I've heard an airplane or evacuated my building. I haven't been widowed at twenty-seven.

But next week I am flying home, this time maybe for good. I don't know if I will walk into a town I recognize at all. I just know I need to be there. I need to understand what downtown must look like, what the smoke must smell like, what the F16s flying overhead must sound like.

I need to know what it means to be a New Yorker now, to have suffered the insufferable, to have risen bereaved but proud and united and hopeful. I need to see my grandparents, who live in Chelsea, and who are trying to maintain their cheeriness. They tell me to
stop calling so much, constantly reassuring me that they are fine.

Grandma brags that Grandpa Jack has been making hundreds of thousands of sandwiches for the volunteers. But I recognize that the gravely sound I hear in my her voice is the result of inhaling smoke for the last week.

Is there anything more important than being with her now?

Everything I was worried about, cared about, wanted, is suddenly overpowered by the driving need to be with those I love. To rally around the city that has rallied around itself.