NOBODY HEARS YOU
JOCELYN LYNN SUNG
It was a cloudless spring day. The weather was finally
ing’s sun, Nikolas Cruz roamed through the hallways and class-
defrosting. The bitter chill that had persisted throughout the
rooms of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. Unlike other
entire winter was finally being swept away by the same gentle
students—who were most likely carrying gift bags of chocolate
breeze that blew my hair into my eyes and cut my vision into
candies or stuffed animals to celebrate Valentine’s Day—he car-
narrow, uneven strips. I stood underneath the kindness of that late
ried an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle. On a day that celebrates love
morning sun, tiny chunks of asphalt skittering away from my feet
and commitment, Cruz opened fire into unsuspecting classrooms
like a family of spooked mice as my feet kept shifting themselves
for six minutes and twenty seconds. He marked seventeen people
underneath me.
for death, and in the end, those actions created a wave of fear
and outrage that swept across the nation.
I watched all of the different classes as they spilled
out of Gallup High’s bright orange double doors in a never-end-
ing stream of students and faculty. Some of the freshmen girls
town of Gallup, New Mexico, that fear and outrage hit me too.
giggled as they walked in their separate cliques. The sophomores
beamed at each other, waving wildly to their friends across the
to me it was just another day with another inevitable tragedy.
rough, fractured asphalt of the blacktop. A majority of the ju-
After Columbine , school shootings happened so often in the
niors—my year—were also enjoying the moment as they mingled
United States that death counts became nothing more than new
among their different friend groups; at least that’s what most
statistics and names were just fleeting whispers in solemn prayers
people would probably see. To me, a few of them mirrored the
and heavy hearts. Virginia Tech: 32 deaths after a student opened
same look of confusion that was undoubtedly showing on my
fire. Sandy Hook Elementary: A man murdered his mother before
own face.
shooting 20 children and 6 faculty members.
Then, there were the seniors. Like everyone else, they
Over two thousand miles away from Parkland, in the I heard about Parkland a day after it happened, but
These types of stories became a presence. They
were ecstatic at the unexpected opportunity to be free from the
numbed people, including myself. After hearing about the latest
rest of their second period. A few of the more outgoing ones
one, I would experience the usual initial shock and resulting
were even giving each other piggyback rides. They sprinted past
heartache, but after an appallingly brief amount of time, it was
me to disappear into the massive crowd of students who were
almost too easy to forget about what happened. These types
wandering around and as they sped by me their shrieks joined the
of atrocities, where classrooms become as unsafe as unlit city
sounds of doubled-over laughter and lighthearted conversations
streets, became common, everyday things.
ringing through the aquamarine sky.
In all honesty, it could have been a good day. It could
have even been a beautiful one, but that would only be true if seventeen people weren’t dead and I never wrote that letter.
2021 RED MESA REVIEW | 87
A month before the unfair warmth of that late morn-
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