I Am Telling You What Happened To Me

At first, I know Fort Douglas—once a US Army post during the Civil War—mostly as a small stretch of red brick buildings that curves along the ridge of a hill in the eastern part of Salt Lake City. Just beyond the buildings is an old cemetery, and I walk here on fall afternoons to clear my head and acquaint myself with a certain view of the Wasatch Mountains, an outline I trace with one eye closed, my finger against the sky.

This is the first landlocked state I’ve lived in, and though the topography here is impressive, at first it feels oppressive. I can’t help but sense that the mountains are keeping me from the ocean, that just on the other side of this range the rocks abruptly yield to a flat blue horizon. Of course, I’m wrong. Beyond the hills, lie more hills. I don’t know it yet, but I’ll grow to love this landscape as much as any place I’ve lived. When I stumble upon the old Fort Douglas cemetery during my first few weeks in Salt Lake, I’m reminded of the old New England cemeteries where I grew up, of different kinds of stone: the headstones lined in cramped, off-kilter rows, so many names lost to years of hard weather.

It’s fall 2012, the first semester I teach. I’m unaccustomed to so many things—the landscape, the dry air, my first-semester college students who veer between bouts of wild enthusiasm and apathy. I’m struck by their openness and how clearly they see me: You’re not from here, they say, before I have a chance to tell them I’ve just moved from Brooklyn. That makes sense, they say afterwards. You have such short hair.

I’m teaching Rhetoric and Composition. Before the semester is over, Obama will defeat Romney, and my students will engage in heated classroom debates about gun control, abortion, and religious freedom. We’ll talk about logical fallacies using language from the election. More than one of my students will plagiarize their entire papers, and more than one of my students will drop the class because of the demands of supporting their young families. Before the semester is over, Adam Lanza will shoot and kill twenty children and six adults at an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut.

This is what happens: When I’m nineteen, an ex-boyfriend, who is only a year older than Lanza will be at the time of the Sandy Hook Massacre, throws me to the ground and gives me a concussion. He’s walking me home from a party, and we argue. He turns to walk away, and I put a hand on his shoulder. He turns toward me, hard, throws me to the ground, throws me clear of my own flip flops, purse contents spilled