all that has made me

by Erin Challenor
Content warning: Gun violence in the U.S.

in second grade I asked my teacher why all the doors in our school had black paper over the windows.

.

in fourth grade the librarian asked me to help her hand out books to other classrooms.

pushing the cart down the hallway reminded me of going to Safeway on Sundays with my sister and my dad; to the left is the bakery of first graders, to the right the third grade deli, coming up on aisle seven is fourth grade soups.

we were trained so that when men go murder shopping they won’t find it with us.

.

during recess in fifth grade someone at the high school a few blocks away brought a gun to school so we went into lockdown only they put us on school buses because there wasn’t enough time to get everyone back inside.

we were told to crawl under the seats and we counted the number of screws on the ceiling and slid pencils back and forth to each other along the grooves of the aisle.

.

the day after Parkland there was a lockdown at our school and our heartbeats felt as loud as gunshots.

that same year we got to go to Seattle to see Hamilton; the actors didn’t use rifles in their performance to us like they normally did.

a student from each school who attended went up on stage and said the names of those who were killed and we all sat on the floor of the theater like they did before he breached the doors that have the same locks as ours.

.

in a lockdown in Latin class sophomore year Mr. Conry told us about the time he was arrested for protesting the Vietnam War and how teenagers will always be the foot soldiers of change but the scapegoats for crucifixion and the socialites of revolution and that America’s tendency to repeat herself is her memento mori.

I carry his fervorous heirloom with me to the frontlines to stare the same government he did in the eyes.

.

sophomore year was also the first year I actually saw the full video.

I breathed through my hand as my history class watched them smash into a tower each in an engulfment of black smoke and history.

my cousins in Scotland asked how America handles 9/11 today and I said we say the word terrorist.

.

during drills they bang on the doors and jiggle the knob and yell and kick and beg for us to open them.

I wonder if those people who unlock the doors are just as scared as we are; they come in thinking I’m sorry, and we say us too.

.

during a lockdown in AP psych junior year Mr. James asked for volunteers to sit closest to the windows because his room doesn’t have a blind spot and boys’ hands shot up like the flares we have in our classroom emergency boxes.

we were too young to enlist.

they planted themselves like soldiers under the windows and played the overtures of war with adrenaline reeking from their hangnails and testosterone dripping from their lips.

.

it took me three months to delete the Pinterest board I'd made years ago about all the things I was going to do in the summer before college like in the movies because with each time the death count overtook war casualties I knew it was never going to happen.

when they replaced the Apple billboard off I84 with the city mask mandate I deleted my entire camera roll.

now it’s been a year and everytime I cry about what I missed because of this virus I say it will be the last time.

in another life is my generation’s anthem.

.

Mr. Conry used to say that we study history to learn from the past so we lie on bridges and do walk-outs and sit-ins and boycotts and graffiti just like they did.

but we have to spread out on the bridges we lay on and we walk out of online class and we paint pigs on the side of the justice center and scratch bastard onto police cars and take videos of when a cop pulls over a Black man and watch their beatings on Youtube as if being alive while they aren’t isn’t a catalyst already and we don’t study history we drown in it.

.

our homegrown heat made us join hands with people we’ve never met and I know that if I didn't have white skin then he would have gone for my face.

.

the summer before college I stared a federal trooper in the eyes while the singeing of stars burned my nose and I promised myself I would stay angry and not afraid but I’ve never seen an automatic up close before and I saw a video on Instagram the day before of them tackling a man on a bike and shoving him into a van and stomping people’s faces into the bricks I used to sit and read on and of barricades of mothers in yellow with barrels to their foreheads and claws of smoke furrling under the blockades to take custody of our odysseys and make cadavers of our screams and turn my city into a televised proverbial war zone turn my city into a crucible turn my city into a rabid pantheon and for the first time in my life I didn’t want to write about it.

.

all my generation wants to do is breathe.

.

at work I found that other freshmen had watched John Krasinski’s online prom too.

a girl who lived on an American navy base in Japan said that they stretched out their hands as they sat down to make sure the seats were six feet apart.

a guy from Texas said they did a drive-by graduation and got to decorate their cars. 

a girl from Iowa said that they had their prom outside.

a guy from Maryland said they did a big zoom call with their graduating class but because it was a webinar they couldn’t turn their cameras on so the only person he saw in a cap and gown was his own reflection.

a girl from California said the teachers made a video for them.

and in Portland we were handed our diplomas through a car window.

.

everyone says when this is all over like a broken record.

it used to be our light, our aviary, our gatekeeper to the postponed.

now it’s an empty murmur; now it’s a hymn we whisper to ourselves at night like soldier’s wives waiting for their loves to come home damaged and unstitched; now it grates across our numb tongues as a customary gesture.

eyes glazed over we say it like a greeting.

.

humans are dependent social creatures with a defiance for admitting that our hungover hearts whine for touch.

for a year we’ve been panting craving starving bleeding crying; for touch.

you can be deaf or blind but what’s it called when you can’t feel anything?

the virus took taste from 2.6 million people but it took touch from 7.6 billion.

.

my generation is starting to make a habit of dreaming and hoping in hopeless nightmares.

.

the black paper over our classroom windows was the first time we learned that the world was a thing to hide from.

but we can’t hide from something that is a part of us. 

we can’t hide from the things that have made us. 

.