thoughts and prayers
May 20, 2022. JFK. I’m standing at the automated baggage carousel waiting for my turn to drop off my checked bag. The system froze and the line is ballooning out behind us as my boyfriend and I anxiously check the clock, watching it creep closer and closer to our boarding time. My eyes are wandering all over the terminal while we’re at a standstill. They linger on a woman near the kiosks. She answers a phone call and her body slumps to the floor, like an invisible rope lassoed her legs and pulled. I see her mouth move before a sound comes out, like a silent prayer between her and whatever God she believes in, and then she screams so loud my spine pricks and I’m standing up straighter than I’ve ever stood up in my life. She’s screaming in agony, and the people at the airport are trying to look away out of politeness, or maybe out of pity, or maybe out of fear. I can’t look away even though I ought to, I watch someone get on their knees to speak to her, I watch a TSA agent attempt to intervene, I watch the woman throw her body to the floor and heave like she’s the only person in the cavernous room. Her grief is on display and no one knows the story. Someone takes my bag and my boyfriend and I give each other a look and we board our flight and forget about it, the small disturbance to our morning that rocked this woman’s entire existence.
July 20, 2012. Broomfield, Colorado. I turn my phone on and it won’t stop lighting up. It’s 3 in the morning and I can’t imagine who would want to talk to me right now. It’s my father and I’m immediately perturbed. “Are you out of the movie?” “Get home immediately.” “Come home when you see this.” I’m with my high school boyfriend and we’re too cool to care about curfews, but I text him back that I’m on my way home. A couple local cops flick a flashlight in our direction as we leave the theater and it strikes me as odd that there are cops there in the first place. We fly down empty streets in my boyfriend’s silver Lexus, indigo light illuminating his profile as my dad keeps sending me text messages. I get home and he’s sitting in his leather armchair, eyes trained to the door he knows I’m about to walk through. He tells me to get to bed and I roll my eyes and walk upstairs. The next morning I learn that 12 people died in a movie theater two towns over.
May 24, 2022. 9th Street, New York City. I’m walking home from dinner, avoiding the news and thinking about taking a CBD gummy before bed. A man is teetering back and forth on the sidewalk, smoking a cigarette and staring straight at me. I stare straight back—I’m angry and he doesn’t scare me. He takes a drag from his cigarette as I walk past him and the smoke curls around me like skeletal fingers, twisting ribbons into the air I step through.
December 14, 2012. Lafayette, Colorado. My family is picking out a Christmas tree at the high school parking lot near my house. We’re very particular about trees—it needs to be bushy and robust, it has a lot of ornaments to carry. Family heirlooms passed down through generations. One of the workers gives me a cup of Swiss Miss and the steam is swirling into the inky sky in tendrils while my parents pay for our new tree. We get home and turn on CNN—20 elementary school children dead. My mom is weeping on our ottoman and my dad rubs her back. I can’t fathom it—20 mangled little bodies, too young to understand what’s killing them. Images of their lives flash by—a girl blowing bubbles, a boy with a temporary tattoo on his face. My face is hot and I feel my tears before I realize I’m crying. Our box of ornaments sits in the living room, untouched. Those families probably had heirlooms too.
December 16, 2021. 9th Street, New York City. My mom texts me without context “I love you Kate.” I tell her I love her too and ask her what that was for. “Nothing just love you” “I will explain later.” My mom is a teacher and I can’t think about how scared I feel for her sometimes or I’ll start crying. I later learn that someone had threatened to shoot up her building.
October 19, 2017. Fort Collins, Colorado. I’m being ushered down a sterile hallway and everything I see is a shade of blue, in stark contrast to the festering yellow light in the waiting room. I’m led into a room with the blinds drawn, and it takes my eyes a minute to adjust. My friends and I file into a line and I’m at the back. I’m scared to get to the front because that makes everything real. I’m thinking hard about what I’ll do when I get there, but then I’m there and I see my friend in her hospital bed and I see the wound-vac slurping blood from her gunshot wound and I see marks from shrapnel and asphalt and tears staining her face and all I can say is “I love you so much.” I hold it together until I get back to the blue hallway, then I burst into tears.
May 22, 2022. San Diego, California. I get a New York Times notification that a man was shot randomly on the subway. It’s the line I take in a station I frequent. He’d just texted his family asking how his parents were doing. He was on his way to brunch.
April 15, 2022. Financial District, New York. I just got my eyebrows done and I’m running late to my next PR appointment. They didn’t give me an Uber code and I’m trying to figure out which subway to take—I never take the train around here. My mom calls me as I’m routing myself on Google maps and I answer to tell her I’ll call her back later. I’m greeted with “oh my God, you’re alive,” and an eruption of sobs (everyone wonders where I get my dramatic flair). I have no idea what she’s talking about and she tells me there’s been a subway shooting. Instinctively I hang up and call my boyfriend, who tells me he’s on the train and can’t talk, and then I call my roommate, who I know is on her way to work. She answers and tells me the shooting was far away from us to ease my fears, but I still can’t shake my mom’s guttural sobs and think of everyone who must have been fighting for their lives underground when I get to my PR appointment 30 minutes late. It’s influencers and me, my least favorite combination, and one girl says “I heard there was some craziness on the subway.” I think she must not have heard the news, so I tell her there was a shooting and she looks at me like she’d said she was craving a hot dog and I responded by telling her how hot dogs are made. “So crazy,” she says, before turning to someone else to talk about her dog. I can’t help but wonder if I am living in hell. I grit my teeth through the event. Once I’m home I open my computer so my dot is green on Slack and cry on the couch until there’s no more liquid in my body.
May 24, 2022. 9th Street, New York City. My group chat is going off. “Omg another elementary school shooting.” Talk of only two kids dead—only two. The number climbs higher and we’re all reacting with horror in real time. “I hate America,” my roommate says, slamming her phone into our emerald couch. The tweets start rolling in like they always do, only to get buried by the next news cycle, only to return when the next mass shooting happens (probably in a few days). Only in America could the mundane be terrifying, only in America could people dream of better lives only to be shot in a (fill in the blank), only in America could armchair activists yell at each other through a screen while politicians ignore 90 percent of their constituents’ wishes.