1. Your home is no longer your home; it is the media’s. There’s eyes, cameras, and field reporters lurking through your cities seeking out suffering. The same overtly political conversations about guns and tragedy. What do they know about tragedy…? People’s bodies are not even in their graves, or in the worse and unfortunately true case identified, yet. It is no longer the streets you learned how to ride your bike on, the arenas that you saw your first concert at, the radio you played far too loud on the way to school. It is a blood bath. The world will continue turning, but for you time will stand still. Looking out your window, the lights are dim. People no longer roam the streets late at night either in a drunken haze or wanderlust.
2. Your attempts to grieve in peace are gone. They will poke and prod into your life–try to get all the details that you yourself have no thought of. Even as the television blares from the dining hall, you cannot feel for hours, nothing but confusion and fear linger. The serenity that came when you heard the slot machines coming off the airplane or the numerous car honking that once rocked you to sleep become mute. Overshadowed by the countless prayers that do nothing for your situation. You’ll grow tired of hearing sorry. You won’t want to hear sorry anymore. You want to be having Sunday dinner with your family at some cheap buffet downtown with options so greasy your hands slip and slid trying to catch onto your fork. You’ll want to drive around the block; dropping the roof top of your convertible and taking in the sun rays that most people distain, but you find comfort in. Comfort… You’ll seek comfort in the sound of a dial tone, the feeling of an open letter, the sight of an old photograph; but this comfort won’t last forever. The leeches, the ones who crave to know, will never let you forget.
3. Your memories of your home will slowly be replaced with images from the new cycle. You’ll be grasping at the last piece of memories that you have of your home, and no matter how hard you try to paint this place back into its once beautiful image, you just cannot make it true. You’ll often reflect back to the first time you were at the Mandalay Bay. You took a school trip to the aquarium to see the dolphins. They swam in fish tanks above your head and in that moment you wanted nothing more than to study them for the rest of your life. There are two ways to be remembered: by making someone so happy that they’ll be convinced they’ll never be happier or scare someone so much they’ll be convinced they never be able to look at it the same. This used to be how you thought of your home, but you are a stranger. You are a stranger sitting in a Taxi not knowing which freeway got you home. You are a stranger. A stranger who no longer remembered what it felt like to be safe in your own bed.
4. People will question everything. Are you crying too much or not enough? Were you there? Do you know someone there? They want the whole story. They want you to say you heard the shots from your house. That you could see, some way outside your screened windows, the flashing lights. Yet their eyes will become down casted when you tell them you were millions of miles away. Instead, you’ll tell them of your neighborhood park, safe and untouched by disaster. The deep green grass that laid under the recently planted Palm Trees. You would often stash your scooter behind the tree and write poetry beneath the cooling leaves, but that’s not what they want to hear. They want to hear about your childhood amusement park; the one with the 160-foot Big Shot drop and the Midway carnival games being destroyed. They’ll want you to say that you can never go back to that park. That part is true.
5. The violence will never end. Turn the television on at your own risk. People are dying. People who look like us are dying. People who look like us are killing. Nu
mb and still, it is radio static all around you. Forty-Nine killed in Orlando. Six shootings took place in California. Four shootings before 9 p.m. The stories start to blend. Your home will only be known for this. Your home is the story, the fear, the death.
