Lights. Locks. Hide.

“So, what would we do?”

In February of 2018, I sat in my freshman year creative writing class. It was the day after Parkland. One of the students in my class had lost her cousin in the shooting. My professor decided to abandon her lesson and instead helped the class make a plan in the event of an active shooter. We debated whether, from two floors up, we could make the jump out of the window with just a few broken bones. Would that be better than waiting in the classroom? Turning off the lights. Locking the door. Hiding under our desks. And my sweet professor promised that she would hold the door closed as long as she could.

“We would turn off the lights. Lock the front door and the doors to our rooms. And then hide. Maybe under the beds? Or in the closets?”

My roommates and I were congregated in the living room of our apartment. Here I made some of my happiest college memories: watching trashy TV, eating bad food, playing too many drinking games. But the feeling in the air was different that night. We were circled together quietly comforting my friend who had just shared the nightmare she had had the night before. A mass shooting. This was just a few days after the one at UNC Charlotte.

Together, we pulled together everything we had learned in the active shooter drills that had flooded our schools in the wake of Sandy Hook. Turn off the lights. Lock the door. Hide.

In December of 2012, I was in eighth grade. That’s the first mass shooting that I remember.

But it’s certainly not the last.

Turn off the lights. Lock the door. Hide.

That thought runs through my head whenever I go anywhere. Shootings don’t just haunt my nightmares, they haunt my waking moments too. When I walk outside, when I enter a school building or a classroom, when I ride the bus, when I go to the grocery store. EVERY time, I think to myself “What would I do?”

Would the laptop in my backpack stop a bullet? If I stood behind the door, if I ducked under my desk, if I jumped out the window, if I hid under the bus seats, if I ran through the aisles? If I negotiate just right, would I be able to convince them not to shoot me? If I angle my body just so, would the bullet slice through my arm but not my heart? If I ran at the shooter, would I be able to knock the gun out of his hand before my body fell to the ground?

Two days before the Buffalo shooting, my friend and I sat picnicking in Paris. With our time here coming to an end, we were earnestly discussing where each of us wants to live next. We mulled over the perfect climate, the importance of public transportation, good healthcare, and politics - especially with the impending Roe decision bearing down on us. And as always, my eyes anxiously scanned the park teeming with happy Parisians. I noted how dangerous this would be back home.

I learned of the Uvalde shooting through Tik Tok. Scrolling through pretty travel videos and funny dating anecdotes, I swiped down to a live news broadcast with a banner reading “14 dead in Texas school shooting.”

As the day went on, that number continued to grow. 18 dead in Texas school shooting. 19. 20. 21.

Did they turn off the lights? Did they lock the door? Did they hide?

Then the posts started flooding Instagram. The same ones that pop up every time. Thoughts and prayers, of course. The numbers: 144 days into 2022 and this is the 213th shooting. Sharing inspiring tales of heroism.

But I don’t want to be a thought, a prayer, or a number. I don’t even want to be a hero.

I want universal background checks. I want gun control.

I want to forget the routine.

Lights. Locks. Hide.

It’s probably about as useful as your thoughts and prayers anyway.