I'm missing Alice today. Wearing a short-sleeved cowboy shirt she gave me, and really missing her. I looked through e-mails we sent back and forth over the last couple of years; we were both really struggling to figure out how to be siblings and friends as adults.

When we were kids, my mother would just send us to our room, without really working anything out. I don't mean to blame my mom, she did her best and was proud that she could provide each of us our own room. Still, we never quite learned how to work through conflict.

When I offered this idea to Alice, all she did was kind of blame me for moving my "room" to New York and creating distance in the family. She knew my hot buttons.

That's the other thing. I located alot of my need to fight, and my aggression, in Alice. That's a sh`tty place to be, the frequent object of someone's hostility, and I'm sorry now for doing this to her. I think alot of us related to Alice in this way, though. And now, without her, I'm totally confounded. How do I deal with crappy tension that arises in me, with nowhere to go? Problem is, I think it's starting to come up in my relationship with Sophie.

I did feel angry with Alice, starting just last weekend, that she's f`cked up my life. Truly, her death has thrown my existence into utter chaos. My rage didn't last long, my sadness in the tragedy overtook it.