LTE: Reflecting on 4/16 in response to the threatening e-mail

Dear sender of the threatening e-mail,

I can only guess as to your motivation for having sent such a message to several members of the Virginia Tech community (and apparently other colleges). Maybe it was a joke. Maybe, God forbid, you’re serious. Either way, I have just one single thing to say in response: you must not know what it’s like.

You must not have lived here in Blacksburg when a shooter opened fire on the Virginia Tech community and slaughtered 32 people.

You must not have been a local police officer I know, who responded to the shooting and heard spurts of gunfire go off like popcorn kernels in a microwave, who described the pace of the incident like this: “As quickly as you could take a pack of erasers into classrooms up and down a hall and take and throw one at each head you see — that’s how fast it was.”

You must not have been barely 12 years old, hunkered down in band class with the lights turned off and the blinds yanked tightly down, watching movies with no idea why. Waiting, all day long, after your principal abruptly interrupted your screeches of music with the intercom to announce we were under a full lockdown: all doors shut and bolted; no one leaves the place where they are.

You must not have been there when we had to phone in to the main office for an escort to go to the bathroom, or when we had to move as quickly as possible through the hallways to get there, or when we had to wait for the cafeteria workers to deliver lunches on rolling carts to the classrooms themselves.

You must not have been there, peeking out the windows when your teacher wasn’t looking, and widening your eyes when you saw how many police cars were parked outside your middle school.

You must not have been there when the teacher turned on the television to play a movie and couldn’t switch off from the news fast enough to keep it secret.

You must not have been there when we were released from school at 5:30 in the evening. When a friend sat across from you on the bus sobbing because her dad was in that building and she hadn’t heard from him yet and Oh God We’re Passing That Building Now and I Haven’t Heard From Him and I Don’t Even Know If He’s Dead He Could Be Dead Oh My God Oh My God Oh My God.

You must not have been there in my house when I got home before my parents and had to wait all alone for them to race back to me.

When I turned on the news.

When all of a sudden I couldn’t breathe anymore.

When my entire world tilted and slipped off the table once again. When I realized all those other people were going to know what it felt like to not have a loved one anymore, too.

You must not have been there when we didn’t go to school again for three days and a weekend and when, when we finally did, we didn’t know how to speak anymore.

You must not be there at Virginia Tech as a student now, cringing when someone brings up that day because you lived it.

You must not be one of my friends or classmates, teachers or friends of friends, who woke up that day with someone in their life and went to bed that night unable to grasp that they would never see their dad-friend-brother-neighbor-sister-student-mom-son-cousin-classmate-lover-daughter. Ever. Again.

You must not be the liberal arts professor who had to take a year off because she couldn’t set foot on this campus anymore.

You must not feel the heaviness of staying up until midnight of April 16 and silently standing before a ring of memorials for 32 minutes after 32 lifeless names have been read aloud on echoing speakers. Of walking slowly by each stone arm-in-arm with a guy from high school who you never even got along with back then, crying together and clutching each other.

Of pausing by one name in particular because that guy you’re walking with lived four doors down from her for 18 years, and she was just a freshman, and she was a light on the basketball court, and she would never dribble a ball again or come home to her parents just 2 miles from her dorm building or text her friends or or or or or or or or.

You must not have a reason to be in the New Classroom Building and notice that it doesn’t appear to have blinds you can draw so you can’t see the classroom from the hallway if someone comes inside with a gun and starts popping erasers popping erasers popping erasers.

You must not sit there, antsy, counting the minutes until you can leave and trying hard to concentrate on class in the meantime.

You must not find yourself writing an email to the university about it and hearing back that they just haven’t been able to put them in yet.

Or waiting, waiting to see them added.

You must not shake. Every time you get a police alert like this and not want to go to campus for anything.

You must not have been there. You must not know what it’s like. Because if you did, if you knew this kind of carnage, you wouldn’t say such things.

— Someone who lived it