I cannot tell you how many times I heard that phrase in Haiti. It usually came shortly after I asked, “Tell me where you were?”

Everyone knew what I meant: Where were you when the earthquake hit? Time and again, the person I was speaking with would start to reply and then go silent. After a pause he or she would simply say, “I have no words to tell you.” “Every day I cry, but not outside — I cry inside,” Phita said, tapping her heart. Crisleme spoke of her “heart going crazy” until she could reach her home and her 4 children (all of whom survived). Lounard, who lost her sister on January 12th, simply gazed at me out of numb eyes.

“It’s all about why,” Roger said. “I ask God why — why did He save me that day?”

Roger lives in the Source-Matelas area north of Port-au-Prince. He was in a classroom in the city when the building shook and fell down around him. He barely got out, but not before feeling a hand grasping his ankle and a voice asking for help. As he climbed out of the rubble, he tried to recruit others to go back and help that anonymous voice, and they told him he was crazy. For all he knows, the person died.

Roger then half-walked, half-ran for almost three hours in the dark to get home — past corpses on the road, burning cars and the ever-present screams rising around him like smoke. No one in his family died that day. But I fear he’ll be haunted for the rest of his life.

I’m a writer, a person who makes her living asking questions and collecting stories like Roger’s, then telling them to others. And when I’m “on assignment,” I know that only a fraction of what I collect will ever “officially” find an audience. Torture for a writer.

But in the world of custom publishing, the desire to tell needs to be tempered by the realities of space and time and budget. For this project, we needed to move quickly — creating a printed piece and an interactive slide show to help our audience grasp the enormity of the need and be motivated to somehow help. Time constraints led to space constraints . . . which led to Roger’s story being just one more that didn’t make it out to as wide of an audience as I would have hoped.

But I told it again and again to friends. And I’m telling it now. Stories just have a way of getting out.