It’s the strangest thing.
There’s a bird whistling outside of my bedroom window in the tree canopy over our street. I’ve never heard one so loudly this late into the evening. I would usually be delighted by the sound of this creature. Tonight it just punctuates the discordance of a world I can’t make sense of.
Parents sent children to their school this morning and now they mourn the life they didn’t reunite with. This creature is singing as if no one bothered to tell him the world should absolutely not go on under any circumstances. I lay awake in bed beneath a blanket of heaviness resisting it as long as I can.
In 7th grade, I cried in front of our family computer with my mom because she showed me I was not zoned for the middle school I wanted to transfer to. Tonight, I read accounts from parents comforting their children who don’t want to go to school tomorrow in fear of an active shooter.
Active shooter.
Even those words combined are an exercise in dissonance. What is an inactive shooter? And why have other countries figured that out so easily?
