Real talk.
Today, when I read the word "Someone" in this prompt, the thought I had was this:
I am someone who experienced? Witnessed? Lived through? A school shooting.
In less than two weeks, it will have been 10 years since the shooting at my university. 10 years since a gunman walked into a lecture hall and opened fire on a large group of innocent students, my classmates. I was a sophomore, 19 years old. The gunman killed five people and injured 17 others before turning the gun on himself. This happened on Valentine's Day, in a building just across the parking lot from the main campus library, where I was working that afternoon. The library, from where I watched people run across MLK Commons, then police cars racing the other way, where I'd been texting with my boyfriend all afternoon about how excited I was to skip my Thursday night class and come to the city to be with him for the weekend--well, those texts turned serious really goddamn quickly. The library... where I called my mom from the break room, in a low, quiet voice, trying to warn her before she saw the news on TV, trying to hide the terror in my words--because I wanted her to hear it from me first. The library--which after being on lockdown for a while, was evacuated by officers and agents in bulletproof vests holding huge rifles--where I'd spent all afternoon laughing and goofing off with coworkers and daydreaming about what might be waiting for me when I got to Rogers Park... that joy immediately turned to sadness and horror and above all else, fear. How fortunate I was to run into some of my high school classmates, sweet girls who took me under their wing that afternoon, taking me just off campus (I remember the slow walk to the parking garage, the time it took to go less than a mile, the helicopters hovering overhead, the insane amount of emergency response vehicles that almost immediately filled up campus). How fortunate I am to be able to think of them, a bright spot on such a dark, horrible day.
Eight minutes is not enough time for this; I should have known better.
But I'll never forget how I got back to my dorm room and turned on the TV and saw my beautiful campus, the building I attended my English classes in and the lecture hall that would become famous via aerial view over the coming weeks, surrounded by ambulances and SWAT teams, and falling to my knees, completely breaking down. I cried the entire time I packed my bags and called my mom and dad and walked to the parking lot on the other side of campus, getting in the Cavalier and heading towards Chicago because in that moment, that was the only place I wanted to be, somewhere I felt safe. I'll never forget stopping for gas just off I-88, and a man and woman rushing up to the counter, asking them for the nearest directions to Kishwaukee Hospital, mentioning something about their child being there. I'll never forget sobbing my eyes out as I drove east, finally making it to Chicago and my boyfriend's apartment and falling into his arms. Watching the news. Trying to understand how something so horrible and so terrible could have happened. I knew people in that classroom. Those who lost their lives... they had so much potential. I didn't understand it then, and I don't understand it now.
I am someone who experienced that herself, 10 years ago, who can't understand how it happened, and how it still. keeps. happening. at schools and universities around the country. I am someone who wishes for change, who hopes with all of her being that one day, no child (nine years old, or 19 years old) will go to school in fear of experiencing what happened that day. I am someone irrevocably changed, and I will always remember that day 10 years ago like it was yesterday.
Forward, together forward.
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