May 2019: Run, Hide, Fight
Last night was my last class of the semester. I brought cookies. The students brought more snacks and we had a feast of cupcakes and Belgian chocolates and girl scout cookies and yogurt covered raisins. Everything spilled on the conference table we sat around. Somehow January had lightened into the last day of April, and after fourteen weeks of reading and writing and making lists and listening to stories and crafting sestinas and thinking about the vulnerability of putting stories on paper, we had arrived to this moment. It was a warm triumph.
The campus felt alive with a feeling only May can bring - ending and beginning in the same breath. A young woman hugged her friend as they crossed the wide avenue. Lanky boys in hoodies stood in a little semi circle near the brick building where my class was. Every time I ran up the steps and rounded the corner of manicured bushes towards the ornate building, I wondered, is this my life? I carried everything I needed - folders, books, markers, lesson plans, print outs, essays and stories and poems with my handwriting in the margins, coaxing everyone along - in the same tote bag. It had been sent with a galley and features the Colson Whitehead quote from when he won the National Book Award: Be Kind, Make Art, Fight the Power. It was a good mantra for teaching creative writing in a world such as the one we are in now.
Yesterday was the last day of classes at University of North Carolina Charlotte as well. I only know that because a gunman came onto their campus yesterday evening and shot six people, two dead and four wounded. In the report, a 24 year old graduate student reports how her professor entered the classroom and said someone had been shot. Moments later, an alert was projected on the screen in their classroom confirming an active shooter on campus. Run, Hide, Fight, the alert said. Secure yourself immediately.
I work at two universities. For employment at both, I had to take an online training about what to do in case of an active shooter on campus. Different actors, different slides. Same message. I often think of the actors running out of a side door to crouch behind a dumpster in a parking lot. Their school campus is more suburban than the ones where I work. In both trainings, bullet points outline the actions we should take: run. hide. fight.
When I left last night, turning off the lights on the classroom and walking down the wide staircases, it was nine pm. The sun had gone down in a way that it was dark out but not pitch black - the very faint beginnings of summer dark. On the lawn in front of the building, a circle of students had flash lights and were shouting. It could’ve been acting. It could’ve been a ritual. Their voices carried across the quad, echoing as I turned the corner, towards the avenue, towards the subway, towards home. It was what the last day of class is meant to look like - shining lights, adventure on the horizon. I resent the new normal, when getting home is an ending that doesn’t happen for everyone.
love,
c