I've been trying to write this blog for the better part of two weeks and I just couldn't make it happen; I apologize for the delay, especially to those who have so openly shared their experiences about that day with me and whose openness has helped me more than anyone could ever imagine. This will appear in multiple parts, both for length and for the sake of organization.
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I can see the shock between the lines and in my words when I reread what I wrote about what happened here in 2007. From where I sit now, it is so, so painful to read because I remember the girl who wrote it-- she spent five hours in front of her computer, crying, trying desperately to make some sort of sense out of the world she lived in which had been so horrifically, tragically ripped apart. What that girl wrote that day, to me, it feels overwrought. I can see her, tears streaming down her face, so intent on addressing what had happened even though she couldn't say it and couldn't refer to it or the date because she still hadn't found a way to accept it. She sat there grasping at straws, so painfully ill-equipped for the task at hand, grasping at straws to construct a framework upon which she could write down what had happened and try to make sense of it all. As I sit here now, three years later, I can see the shock in my words and even read it between the lines of what I wrote. So, so much has happened since that day in April, since April 16, 2007... that girl, I barely recognize her.
I've never written about my personal experience of April 16, 2007; I've spent three years afraid of recalling the events of that day and putting them in black and white. I told myself that I had refrained for purity's sake-- I didn't want to write down what had happened and end up muddying the details or creating false memories-- but that... that's not it at all. I wanted to forget, to erase it from my mind and try to carry on like it had never happened.
How I thought that I could carry on when that day and the three days preceding it at once feel as if they were yesterday and a lifetime ago, I will never know. I have clung to the phrase, "Silence is so accurate," like a safety blanket, and for the better part of three years I have used it as a way to not talk about that day, about the last few moments of normalcy of my life. Sitting here now, though-- I'm not that girl anymore. So here goes...
The first thing I remember about that day in 2007 is the bleak, grey sky that greeted me when I woke up. I didn't have class until 10:10AM, and I had planned on waking up early to go to ABP (Au Bon Pain) on campus to pick up two iced coffees and two bagels for breakfast with a friend. She had class on the second floor of Norris from 9:05-9:55AM that morning with her next class in McBryde (where my class was) and we had planned on using the fifteen minutes in between for food and whatever gossip that I absolutely, positively needed to know about. I was going to wait for her in the hallway outside of her classroom that morning, breakfast in hand, but I didn't.
When I woke up that morning, I could hear the wind howling around the sides of my apartment building and I could feel the resulting drafts of cold air make their way into my apartment. It was so bleak, so dreary, so bone-chillingly cold that I called off my morning plans at the first sign of snowflakes and decided to stay in bed. I hit the snooze button a few times and finally turned my alarm off-- I'd get out of the house in time for my second class at 12:15, just not my first.
If you've ever heard me describe why grey is one of my favorite colors, or how the beautiful the world looks under a silvery-grey sky, it's because a grey morning's weather saved my life. Were the weather, the one thing that kept me at home in my bed that day different, I would have stumbled out of bed and have been in on the second floor of Norris Hall, smack in the middle of horror, the awful, the everything that happened that morning.
I stayed in bed that morning, safe from harm, warm under my covers, completely unknowing of what had happened less than a mile away from me. I had heard and dismissed the wailing sirens passing my apartment, and I almost ignored the ringing of my phone only to see that my boyfriend's mother was calling me at 10am on Monday morning-- a little peculiar, non? I answered the phone and there she was on the other end, "I heard on the news that there was a shooting at Virginia Tech... you weren't involved, were you? Are you ok?"
I, on the other end of the phone, was all "Um, no... I would have heard about that by now. "
I checked my e-mail and there was nothing. I checked again and again and again... the first e-mail about the first shooting in West Ambler-Johnson eventually hit my Inbox and it didn't seem like a big deal. The second e-mail, the alarming one about a shooter being loose on campus... that one hadn't arrived yet. I don't remember what happened next, I called my family, all of them, Grandma and Ed, Mom, Grandaddy and Granny... and then, because the lines were jammed, I stayed off the phone. I received calls from people I hadn't spoken to in three or four years, since high school, people who were looking to find out if anyone from our high school had been hurt, to find out if I was okay, to check on me and make sure I was safe. I had no idea what was going on at all, and as I had just turned my cable off-- it was way too expensive a luxury to keep around when I was broke and had no roommate with whom to share the cost-- I was glued to my computer for the rest of the day.
I don't remember much of the rest of the day, except for god-awful cry that I let out when the death toll had risen over 20. I was about to take a shower and my computer was on the sink... I heard the number 22... twenty two people, at least, confirmed dead... Norris Hall...
I didn't know my body was capable of emitting the cry, the wail, the keening that came out of it at that moment.
My boyfriend at the time, who in December 2008 would become my fiance, had just started the night shift at work and wasn't yet awake. His mom promised to tell him what had happened, and when he woke up-- she woke him up once the death toll got really high-- he called me immediately and made arrangements to drive down to Blacksburg and "save me" so that I didn't have to be there alone. I was on edge the entire time I waited for him to show up, I had been crying, shellshocked all day, I hadn't eaten a thing, and no matter how hard I tried to fall asleep, I couldn't. When he showed up, I was afraid to leave my apartment, and when I finally stepped outside, I could feel the pain, the despair in the air around me. We went to Macado's for dinner and were glued to the coverage on CNN; he told me about driving down in a convoy of news vehicles and satellite trucks, and I sat there in disbelief. We were in a ghost town.
I asked him to take the long way home from Macado's so that we could take a look at the side of campus closest to my house, the side with the commuter lots. Campus had been closed down, but the Inn, the parking lots... they were full of satellite trucks. I will never forget the haunting, otherworldly image of satellite dishes illuminated by the streetlights in the parking lot, or the flashing blue police lights that pierced the dark sky. I later learned that at the time we drove past campus and saw blue lights emanating from behind McBryde, from near Cowgill Hall (which was next to/behind Norris), the bodies of the dead hadn't yet been removed from the building.
And then we went home, where I spent the night on my laptop, responding to e-mail (responding to my professors who had sent out messages asking if we were safe, unharmed) and on Facebook trying to figure out who had been enrolled in the French class that was in Norris 211 and who had been killed. I was upset that the room where I had decided I wanted to be an art historian was the site of something so awful, so horrible... I remembered the images we had studied in that classroom, the crucifixions and depositions and the images of Madonna and Child from Renaissance Art + Architecture and I was weirdly comforted that those images, holy to perhaps some of those people who died in that place, had been projected onto the walls of that room a year and a half before.
I stayed up into the wee hours of the morning, unable to sleep, reeling from the events of the day that had just passed. Just two days before, I was in the middle of cooking for the French Club's International Week festivities remarking that I never knew who Madame Couture-Nowak was, and that I was sick of not knowing who she was, that I was going to search her out and introduce myself so I could put a name to a face.
Except that day, I had no way of doing just that anymore; that day she died.
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