Eldridge Street, New York City

Have I come to the moment where I can retire this diary? It seems that way sometimes. It's not that I've been so busy.  In fact, I spend quite a bit of my time alone these days. Long stretches of no one.  Sometimes it is so maddening that I am tempted to hurl one of my books against the wall, just to hear myself make a sound. Other days, I cannot bear any noise. The drone of NPR offends me, Beethoven a kind of ringing in my ears. And then I go out and see my friends and have a lovely old time.  But all the while all I want is to be home.

The days and the hours pass.  I am watching the clock.  One year.  I am fine, so far.  I don't know what will happen to me in March. Maybe nothing at all. Maybe everything.

My mother needs me to call her now, to give her some kind of comfort after a big old fight with my sister. But I don't call and I don't write.

I am reading a book about a large family and I see myself in each of the children.

Yesterday, I went to a synagogue in the Lower East Side/Chinatown for a little exhibit called The Last Word where people write on slips of paper things that they wish they'd said.  I got there before Wendy and on a piece of a paper I wrote: "I hope you weren't my last chance." I hesitated a few seconds and then I signed my name -- Zoraya.

I don't know if I meant the lost man or the aborted baby.

When Wendy showed up and started pulling out bits of paper and reading, I wondered if from the hundreds of sheets of paper rolled like cigarettes, would she find me?