Gravity

My fiancé, Fernando, wants to buy a gun because the elderly father of one of his high school friends in Santo Domingo was held at gunpoint in his own home for four hours, robbed, and murdered. We aren’t in the Dominican Republic, I tell him. We aren’t even in Florida.

That’s why it’s safer to be a gun owner, he says, as if in Seattle, gun lockers stay locked, guns aren’t shot at the wrong people, by the wrong people. Like there is a place on the planet where guns are shot by the right people. Like our cold, liberal city filled with constant mist and gray skies is all we need to keep our children safe from fire and sharp metal and blood pooling on a family room floor.

I tell Fernando the stories about the kids who were shot while I grew up in Florida. I tell him about the ones who survived and the ones who did not. He says something about hurricane country, the way my people had to rebuild and rebuild and rebuild. He tells me he can’t fathom a life with so much rebuilding, even though hurricanes sometimes hit Santo Domingo, where he grew up and rebuilt, too. He says something about preventable tragedies. I remember the gun at the top of my dad’s closet, a gun I can picture even though I never saw it, was too afraid to ever look at it, a gun my dad shot at least twice before I was born: once at some of his drug smuggling enemies in South America; again, through his sister-in-law’s windows, trying to chase her out of Florida after she received no jail time for shooting Dad’s brother in the back of the head.

Fernando tells me he wants a gun, and like magic, our neighborhood app fills our phones with notifications. Was that a gunshot?

No, fireworks.

No, a truck kickback.

No, that was definitely a gun.

I tell Fernando about the kid who accidentally shot his friend in elementary school, shot a hole through his jawbone, but thank god it didn’t hit his brain. The friend’s jaw had to be sewn up, and he missed school until it healed completely. Nobody talked about it when he came back. He grew his hair long and leaned forward when he talked to cover up the scar.

We tell each other the stories of guns going back and forth like playing hot potato with an unused bullet. We tell ourselves we’re remembering. We tell ourselves that we’re trying to figure out whether guns are the danger or a vicious shield. Gun to gun to gun, we tell ourselves and we tell each other, as if the storytelling about guns could turn them into fairy tales, as if they aren’t going off, even right now, somewhere, everywhere, shooting, shattering the atmosphere or a body or a life, shattering and banging and collapsing and shattering.

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God created men. Col. Colt made them equal, read one of the most popular slogans for the first widespread handguns in recorded history, invented by Samuel Colt, a northeastern American, in the early 1800s. To market his handguns, Colt hired painters to create epic scenes of fellas using his product to kill bad guys as defined by the colonial sentiments of the time: wild animals, Indigenous people, and bandits. Col. Colt passed out special edition guns to politicians and other prominent figures with messages engraved on the weapons. He bought a two-dozen-page spread in a popular newspaper, featuring images of his gun factory, as if understanding how the weapons were made and how big the enterprise of making them had grown would make more people ready to own one.

By the time of his death in 1862, Col. Colt sold over 400,000 guns, which meant that, at the time, almost one in seventy people residing in the United States owned a Colt. That makes sense if you believe the movies about the whole country operating like the wild west. Life, of course, wasn’t a cowboy flick. It’s more reasonable to assume that guns were mishandled or misused by untrained hands to the same extent that they are fumbled today, only with potentially less tragic consequences as a Colt could fire only one bullet at a time.

The data from the mid-to-late 1800s doesn’t report details about gun-related deaths—how many there were across the U.S., whether they were homicides, suicides, or accidents—but now it does. Despite education and televised news withering us with massacres, accidental gun deaths, and stray bullets day in and day out, the tragedies increased nearly every year over the past decade. At the time of this writing, gun violence across murders, suicides, and accidents in the United States eliminate between forty-five and fifty thousand people per year and harm or contribute to the deaths of thousands more.

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I can’t remember the name of the kid who had to get his jaw sewn up around that unfortunate bullet wound. I remember his hair though—and his eyes. I remember the names of the kids who didn’t survive. I do remember Jesse. I think about her the most because Jesse was a school friend, someone I talked to often in middle school and the first year of high school, the year she died.

I liked sitting with her at lunch because it was quiet where she sat, alone at the picnic tables, outside and away from the roar of students in the cafeteria. She ate the gross school lunch, like I did, waving away seagulls and looking away from the sun. I wondered if she, too, was on a state affordable lunch plan, but I never asked her.

Sometimes, I sat outside with her and talked to her about football practice and the petitions some of the popular kids’ parents sent around to remove her from the boys’ football team. She shrugged a lot. She held eye contact longer than most people. She asked unexpected questions like, Are you an older sister? And, Do you slouch because you’re afraid to intimidate people? She informed me, You know, it’s okay to be the tallest person in the room.

I asked her questions about football, which I knew nothing about, except that I had briefly dated a running back on her team whose mother had won and then swiftly spent a large amount of money from the Florida lottery. I wanted to tell her about my ex-boyfriend, simply because she knew him, and I didn’t know anyone else who spent time with him. I wanted to ask her if she knew why my ex-boyfriend still dressed in clothes from Walmart, even though his mother could afford a huge house by the water. I wanted to know why it seemed like girls and guys cared about such different things. I don’t know why I believed Jesse would have an answer for me, maybe because she was willing to squeeze into all those pads and put that clunky helmet on her head and slam her body against the bodies of boys, because she spent so much time with them, because she cut her hair short and marched with the ROTC. Maybe I wanted to gossip about my ex-boyfriend with Jesse just to gossip. Maybe I wanted to open the door to talking about more intimate things.

The year before, a rumor spread around the school that Jesse was a lesbian, and, although I had dated and hooked up with one of the popular girls for months, we were afraid to tell anybody. That popular girl’s mother had escaped a violent marriage in the Middle East, and she believed she’d be disowned if her mother discovered that we were not, in fact, giving each other pedicures or accidentally falling asleep in the same bed every weekend.

I never brought it up to Jesse. I was too nervous, and I didn’t want her to think I believed the rumors about her if they weren’t true. I didn’t want her to feel judged, and I didn’t want her to think I was uncool or that I cared whether she was, as dudes wrote on her locker, a dyke.

Just because I can kick a football doesn’t mean I eat pussy, I overheard Jesse holler to one of the guys on her team at the beginning of the school year. They were too far away, so I couldn’t tell if they were fighting or joking.

I kept my conversations with Jesse surface level, which I regretted the minute I heard of her death. Not that opening up to Jesse would have changed anything. Regrets defy logic in the way they scream into your belly after someone unexpectedly dies. For years after her murder, I noticed these regrets shooting through me every time I thought about Jesse, and I struggled to figure out how to honor the short life she had without centering myself in the circumstances of her life and death, as so many girls did at our high school, even if they had never met or spoken with Jesse.

Even though we were nothing alike—she was athletic, and I was a stick-thin, quirky artist—we were on the same plane in the hierarchy of middle and high school. Not exactly geeks, not cool. It’s possible our lunchtime meetings may have eventually blossomed into an actual friendship. It’s also possible they would have abruptly ended when one of us became distracted by our developing social lives.

It haunts me that none of us get to know what would have happened or who Jesse might have become. It’s brutal to imagine her potential future. Every imagining is shot to shit the minute I remember that her story ended when she was fifteen in an act of needless and impulsive cruelty.

I wish, as survivors are wont to do, that I could crank the world in a different direction: remove the bullets from the gun, remove the man who killed her from the planet before he had the chance to buy a gun in the first place, remove all the world’s guns and bullets and every urge to shatter a living creature with a blade of fire and metal that moves faster than sight.

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The third time Fernando took me to his hometown of Santo Domingo, the capital city of the Dominican Republic, we went on a long walk in the heart of town near the historic La Zona Colonial with its concrete houses, the burnt-orange walls of the old fort, and statues of genocidal maniacs who colonized the island and mutilated the Indigenous people they found there. Every time Fernando and I walked past the statue of Columbus, one of us remarked in delight about the carpet of pigeon poop freshly dropped across it. Neither of us could deny the charming beauty of the massive, poop-covered sculpture that is always surrounded by scores of overweight pigeons as tourists and locals scatter food for them daily at Columbus’s feet. Imagine this place filled with trees, he told me, as we walked through his old neighborhood. The houses were short and painted bright colors. Every window and most of the doors were crowded with iron bars.

He explained that a politician had cut down many of the lush, old-growth trees in the city several years ago and planted thin palm trees in their place. The politician wanted to make Santo Domingo look more like Miami with its bare, modern streets, art deco design, and palms. Miami is the only place in Florida that looks like that, I told him. I’ve always thought people were trying to make Miami look more like Cuba or the Caribbean. Florida is more like strip malls and swampland, all the way through.

We talked about cities trying and failing to morph into Hollywood versions of each other, each of them trying to become a place that has never existed and probably never will, these tropical civilizations torn apart just to look like some imaginary place that is supposedly better than the place it actually is. We walked through his old neighborhood, imagining the lost, lush trees. I told him about the dredged beach in my hometown on the Florida Panhandle, the way sand was pulled up from the middle of the Gulf of Mexico and plopped onto the shoreline to rebuild the beach. For months during the dredging, the shoreline was filled with the detritus of so many lives: old shoes, radios, ball caps, coolers, lawn chairs, and whatever else fell off the side of a boat and drifted down into the floor of the Gulf. The ecosystem was fucked by dredging too, resulting in whole schools of beached fish, man o’wars, some dolphins and sharks, weird seaweed patterns, and so many broken shells. I wonder how small Florida would be without all those efforts to keep the state above water, he said. We watched a guy on a motorcycle pass us for the second time. The motorcycle guy looked at us sideways as he passed. Fernando put his finger against his lips and listened to the air.

Shit, I’m sweating sunblock in my eyes, I said.

Shh, he said, so soft. I poured warm water onto the edge of my shirt, using it to wipe my eyes over and over, and we listened. Two motorcycle motors in the distance, one of them approaching.

Give me your purse, he said. I handed it to him, and he slung it over his shoulder. When I tell you to run, you run, okay?

Okay, okay, I said, blinking, my eyes blurry and burning, understanding that everything had shifted, that there was an imminent danger, though I didn’t know what it was.

Fernando turned toward the street as motorcycles entered from both sides. He put his arms out and yelled at the motorcycle men in booming Spanish, telling them he was Dominican, telling them to back the hell off.

The motorcycles swept past without incident. Run, he said, and we did. To that restaurant, he pointed, and we went. We walked up the stairs where vines wove into the guardrails and onto a patio. We sat next to a fan and ordered a pitcher of sangria. Fernando told me how he knew the two tall, skinny kids on motorcycles were trying to rob us: the way they scanned us twice before I even noticed, the bulge of their weapons in the backs of their pants. Fernando told me his plan of attack, should the motorcycle bandits have tried to pull my purse off his body. He used terms from the MMA and jiujitsu he’d been practicing for twenty years. He talked about how to break a man’s arm, how he was ready to kill them if they tried to kill us. He shook a little while he talked and watched me drink all the sangria. I held ice cubes, melting, under my eyes, and we looked at a map of his old neighborhood. He wanted to take me to the apartment where he grew up, to show me the courtyard where he sat with friends, watching cars pass by and dreaming about American 1980s fashion. We mapped a route that kept us mostly on busy streets and walked it as fast as we could.

Standing in front of Fernando’s old building, we compared stories about our childhood in hot cities, how he was never barefoot on the concrete, how I almost never wore shoes. He said, The city is different, and that’s expected, but I don’t know how to feel safe here. Not even safe. I’ve spent my whole life in the U.S. worried that the D.R. wouldn’t survive, that I’d return, and everything I remembered would be gone. That happened, in a way. And now there’s all this violence where there used to be trees.

We walked back to the sangria restaurant along busy streets to sit and wait for his sister’s driver to take us back to the gated community where his whole family lived, one of the few parts of town where most people didn’t get robbed, where it was mostly okay to have windows without iron bars soldered across them. His sister poured coffee into tiny espresso cups. A fan womped above us. She handed me a cup and asked if it was sexy to see Fernando protect me like he did, like a gorilla, like a man. I hesitated. I thought about Fernando’s shoulders, the thin strap of my purse slung across one, his arms out, walking toward the motorcycles. I thought, too, about the faces of the motorcycle bandits, their young faces, similar to so many of my community college students, their jaws set in a kind of power pose, their minds probably scanning their own bodies for weapons, scanning mine and Fernando’s bodies for risk.

I’m not saying the humanity inside of someone who is about to commit a crime is more important than the crime, the fear, the harm they wanted to cause. Of course my fiancé was super sexy inside his readiness to throw down, to keep my body safe, but I’m not the kind of person who gets excited about my man fighting for my honor. It would terrify me to see anyone I love in a fist fight, even though all the variables that day on the street were in our favor: Fernando’s size, his training, the adrenaline pumping through everyone, my presence as a hot coal of dread slinging his anxiety and readiness to fight into overdrive.

I am saying: it was impossible, even with my vision blurred by the burning sunblock in my eyes, to not catch the humanity in the eyes of those kids on their motorcycles, both at least ten years younger than me.

I’m saying that I wonder what drove those kids to put their hands on what appeared to be guns bulging from the backs of their pants as they passed us.

I don’t know the D.R. like I know Florida, but I’ve seen plenty of thin kids swell up with power after stealing from a department store or robbing their weed dealer, after being hurt and hungry their whole lives.

I am saying: it feels like the world demands a reactionary brutality that I don’t know I can show up for, not completely, like I should want to destroy their bodies immediately, simply because they probably wanted to destroy mine.

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After Colt’s gun patent expired, gun production exploded even more with Remington, Starr, Whitney, and Manhattan. Smith and Wesson produced the fastest discharge and reload revolver of the moment. Then, the Spencer repeating rifle and the Henry lever-action rifle introduced magazine bullet storage, making these weapons into guns that history buffs and gun owners still claim “you could load on Sunday and shoot all week long,” a prospect that I imagine was unrealistically exciting for gun owners at the time. Exactly who, of gun owners living in the mid-1800s, would need to shoot a gun all week long, unless you were at war, planning a mass murder, or whipping out your weapon on the regular in an edgy, aggressive saloon.

In the 1860s, Richard Gatling invented a hand-cranked, multiple-barreled weapon that could fire two hundred rounds per minute. Even today, almost two hundred years after Gatling’s patent was approved, I can only think of a handful of situations that would warrant a need or rational desire to spray two hundred bullets across any collection of bodies inside of a single minute.

Probably, rationality and the fact that a single bullet’s impact on a living human body has very little to do with the boom of gun invention, the relentless desire for more soaring bullets faster and faster.

Probably, the rush of gun development was more about feeling powerless and small inside of the surge of a changing world.

Probably, even the people who buy guns today have unrealistic expectations about who they might count as enemy and how many bodies they will meet in their lives who actually deserve the point of a gun.

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When I was fourteen, I brought my first boyfriend over to my dad’s house, and, as promised, my dad sat at the kitchen table cleaning a long gun he’d borrowed from a neighbor. My boyfriend sat across from Dad, and Dad asked him questions and teased him and shook his hand. After, my boyfriend drove me to the beach in his mom’s minivan. That was intense, he said.

I don’t think he even knew how to clean the thing, I said.

What thing?

The gun.

What gun?

You didn’t see the gun on the table?

That was a gun?!

What did you think it was?

I didn’t really look.

Why was it intense if you didn’t know it was a gun?

Your dad is really protective.

Did he say anything weird?

Just that he’d “do anything” to keep you safe. He said “anything” in this intense way.

He’s just being Southern.

Do you think he’ll actually hurt me if we ever break up?

Of course not.

Hmm.

He was just being a dad.

I’ve never met a dad like that.

That’s because you grew up in the fancy part of town, I said, and it was more true–and important–than I understood at the time. At the time, I’d been going to the school in the fancy part of town for four years, and even though we rarely had a full meal at home, I’d aligned myself with the identities of my affluent peers. Like, if you want something bad enough, it’s possible to become it. Like the American dream is real. Like class is a matter of choice.

Because of the location and resources at my school, I was learning feminist and humanist rhetoric. I believed that my dad’s belief systems about justice and revenge and scaring teenaged boys by cleaning unfamiliar rifles while making vague statements of the relative importance of their daughters compared to someone else’s son were outdated and cartoonish. I believed, like the new age self-help books that were popular at the time, that peace was always possible with good intentions and a kind heart.

I didn’t know that, compared to Dad, my life was soft. I didn’t understand that hard lives led to harder decisions and limited choices. I didn’t understand that the “up by your bootstraps” mythology that made millennials feel like we were primarily responsible for manufacturing our own opportunities was an old-world myth used to spread a weird mixture of hope for unachievable success and shame for failing to achieve it, rapid fire, across communities, states, and countries, the kind of shame that keeps people working themselves ragged to crawl out from under it or die trying.

At the time, I didn’t stop to think about the bootstraps metaphor. All the men in my family wore boots on the regular, so I knew a thing or two about pulling them on–that you had to sit down to do it, that it’s physically impossible to pull yourself up by your own bootstraps, that gravity coming up from the core of the planet will always be stronger than the hardest pull you can ever pull in your life.

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In 1882, the invention of the pump action opened a portal to automatic weapons. As if the Gatling’s death spray of two hundred rounds in one minute wasn’t enough, the Tommy gun shrunk World War I’s giant machine guns small enough to fit between human hands, and, even better, Tommy guns could be hidden inside of an oversized suit jacket or a small bag.

During its first release in 1921, the Tommy gun cost two hundred dollars, nearly four thousand dollars in today’s money. They were affordable only to state police and European armies who came to the states to purchase the weapons. Eventually, their most popular owners, prohibition gangsters, bought them up. Firing up to seven hundred rounds per minute, the Tommy gun flashed the word massacre across the world in historic proportions. Imagine an emperor or war lord or pharaoh in antiquity getting their hands on some kind of magic that could kill over a thousand people inside of a minute. Imagine the kind of religious zeal that would follow that kind of power.

We’re so used to it now, the outrageous capacity to spray so much death out of a loud, metal wand, but it is no less outrageous. How is it possible that, as of this writing in the early 2020s, it has only been one hundred years since any guy with enough dough could wield that kind of terrible magic? One hundred years is nothing against the history of humanity, two to three generations total.

One hundred years means that there are still people alive who knew the world before this kind of massacre became something common folks would regularly fear.

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I did not survive a school shooting, but I was at school when the world found out about Columbine. In my memory, Jesse died right after Columbine or maybe even the same day. In reality, Columbine happened on Hitler’s birthday on April 20, 1999, and Jesse was murdered by her stepfather with exactly one bullet, exactly one year and seven months later.

It has been more than twenty years since the night Jesse died, and I’m still protective of her story. Florida laws make criminal records available to anyone who requests them, so I could have looked at the reported details of her death at any hour of the last two decades, but I didn’t consider it. I don’t like “true crime.” I’ve seen too much of it in real life, and I didn’t want to imagine the emotional load of that night. I believed that not knowing was somehow respectful, like resisting the pervasive pop culture indulgence in true crime would keep some part of Jesse safe.

But she is not safe. She is dead.

That day on vacation when Fernando said he wanted to buy a gun, I railed against it. I kept thinking Jesse Jesse Jesse, but Fernando didn’t know Jesse’s story. Neither of us knew very much about Jesse’s story. A gun is just a tool, Fernando said. He compared it to a knife. Intellectually, the argument made some sense. But what if Jesse’s stepfather felt the same way about guns, right up until the moment when that tool became a weapon?

Years later I ordered Jesse’s records and researched the history of gun production and sales in the United States to understand how that transformation can happen: from buying a gun to shield your family from harm to using it against them.

I know now that Jesse and her mother were murdered with a Colt .45 over one hundred years after Colts went on the market. When I finished reading the records, I thought about the concept of fault. I imagined a pea-sized sphere of energy between Jesse’s stepfather’s finger and the trigger, and when he pressed in, he set it off like a mushroom cloud across a century of transactions, weapons bought, sold, and fired; laws argued and passed; audiences leaning forward in rows while action flicks and serial killer movies flashed red light across their faces.

The police report did not give me the narrative arc of Jesse’s story, the moments jolting toward the worst climax in the world, and I don’t want to invent the story of how Jesse died across these pages because I was not there. The story does not belong to me. It belongs to Jesse and her mother. It belongs to Jesse’s little sister, a girl I met three times before Jesse died, a girl I do not know, a girl who had the words sole survivor etched onto her when she was ten years old and way too young to have to carry words like that, as if anyone is ever old enough to carry words like that.

I can tell you that when I read the flat, objective lines describing the scene, my body revolted. I felt sick. I wanted to delete the description of their bodies; I wanted to forget. I thought about the size of my oldest child’s hands, fifteen that year, the same age Jesse was when she died. I felt guilty. I felt like an asshole looking back at someone else’s tragedy to try to figure out my own discomfort with firearms.

I can tell you that both Jesse and her mother died with their arms “bent and positioned upward, toward their heads,” the way victims of the atomic bomb put their hands up in front of their faces, like their own hands could protect them from a wrath like that.

Maybe that’s why we consume stories about true crime so ravenously— searching for a code, a pattern, a map toward protecting ourselves from the surprise of violence. Over 80 percent of the U.S. population consumes true crime media. It is the fastest growing audiobook category—and the most popular podcast genre among women. Is it our fear that churns up our excitement about how it happened, about unpacking the days before a heartbreak, about examining the aftermath? Or is it easier to use these stories as tools to understand ourselves, rather than connect with other people’s lived experiences of being so brutally victimized?

In How to Do the Work, Dr. Nicole LePera describes the loop of emotional addiction that many of us live through each day: waking up to our to-do lists, our adrenaline kicked into action, trying to make it to work and get shit done, our frustration shot up every time something pisses us off, our bodies releasing as we solve problems or complain or vent, our bodies torn up emotionally by the time we get home and are tired, so tired, our belief that we need to watch something that unsettles us just enough but allows us to relax in some kind of answer. All kinds of television work for this, but true crime or serial killer series are likely some of the best because everything is at stake: we watch them, stressing out about other people’s terrible mysteries and tragedies, our bodies tightening and relaxing along with the plot, just like we have been doing all day about the mundane (or even intense) stressors in our own lives. The worst moments of someone else’s life become our emotional gym. After we’ve used their experiences to purge our feelings, we turn off the television, turn away from their reality, safe again. We can finally rest.

Dr. LePera thinks we seem to be addicted. Probably, the shame of enjoying other folks’ misfortunes keeps us going.

Probably, the compassion we have for the victims keeps us going too.

I do wonder if the dramatized stories distract us from the plain, terrible truths. Jesse died because of a gun. It was too easy for her stepfather to kill her. He did not fire off a magazine or crank his gun over and over. There was no spray, no massacre. There were only three shots that night and three bodies hitting the floor.

When the news of Jesse’s death was announced at Gulf Breeze High School, it smacked us all at once. You could see it: hundreds of students in the gymnasium jolted at the same time, like electric shock, like a gut punch, like boom.

Immediately, I imagined the horror of that gun barrel. I hoped she didn’t see it before she died.

I did not want to know whether she or her mother died first, though speculation about that specific fact became an obsession in the freshman class. I wanted to tear out the hair of the gossipy girls who kept talking about things like that, even though I understood, even then, that they were probably gossiping, like we all do in our least flattering moments, to process our own fear, to make ourselves believe that if we understand it better, we might be able to protect ourselves.

LePera writes about how our emotional addiction, the way we love to stress and complain and resolve and ramp up and stress and complain and resolve and ramp up, over and over and over, how these patterns of stress and release start in childhood, how these addictive cycles keep us from being able to enjoy the smoothness of peace.

She writes about restoring balance to the nervous system, about undoing the emotional damage our childhood traumas, no matter how small, built into us. She redefines trauma, resisting the common beliefs in the mental health community that define trauma as a catastrophic life event that divides a person’s life into the before and the after or extreme abuse or neglect. LePera adopts a wider definition of trauma that should “include a diverse range of overwhelming experiences or, as the neurologist Robert Scaer defined it, any negative life event ‘that occurs in a state of relative helplessness.’”

When I track through my own experiences of violence and assault, though smaller in comparison to Jesse and so many others, helplessness is a throughline that makes memories intolerable, or, as my EMDR therapist says, disturbing. Before our sessions, he tells me that a memory is only trauma in its capacity to continue disturbing you. Can you remember it with a regulated nervous system? Can you remember it, knowing that it hurt, maybe even still being a little bit hurt or even angry, but knowing that it’s over, that it doesn’t have to continue to harm you, that enough things have changed in your life, that it will not happen again?

Helplessness is buried in all the memories I have that want to keep disturbing, keep harming. Helplessness is one of the most difficult emotions to resolve because it is the precise feeling of not knowing how to change things or rescue yourself. It is a trapped feeling, a feeling without hope, without answer. Unlike killer documentaries or true crime shows, in your most disturbing memories, the solution hasn’t happened yet. No stranger with a PhD has come into your childhood bedroom to examine the evidence. No group of writers has sat together in a room crafting your story for the audience. When you’re inside of helplessness, you’re in it, and it feels like forever, and there is no help.

When I told my dad about Jesse and her mom, he said, If that motherfucker didn’t kill himself, he would’ve been in a world of hurt for the rest of his life.

Dad sounded angry when he said it, even though he didn’t know Jesse or her mother at all. He sounded protective. His body looked different, like tension had slapped through his whole form. His jaw was set under his manicured beard. His wide shoulders were pulled up. He balled one hand into a fist. He talked about how men are supposed to use the fights they’re born with to protect their families from a fucked-up world, and he couldn’t understand a man who’d turn that fight against his own family. The kids at school said Jesse’s mother was trying to leave him, I said.

Damn it, he said. He talked about how control is an illusion that human beings like to imagine so we can pretend we aren’t animals at the whim of a chaotic world. It’s the most dangerous illusion to try to hang onto. He softened a little bit. She was just a kid.

It’s a common thing to say, maybe even cliché, but inside of that phrase is a world of helplessness, all the wonder and magic of a childhood burned immediately to ash. A kid dying when they did not need to die. A whole school of kids shot when they did not need to be shot. A world shattered over and over, a thousand rounds per minute, or more.

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When Fernando talks about the hurricanes I grew up with, the constant state of rebuilding, I remember it’s not normal to lose a chunk of your house every summer for three years in a row. It’s not normal to need a new roof or a new shed or to scoop up floodwaters from your kitchen. It’s not normal to hide in the bathtub with your little brother with a thin mattress covering your bodies. It’s not normal to dance in the front yard during the eye of a hurricane while your parents run around the yard gathering large, sharp objects that landed all over the street, branches and aluminum siding carried into our neighborhood from some other part of the city. It’s not normal to run in the house when the winds start to ramp up again.

It’s not normal to live without water or electricity or fresh food or gasoline for a week or more because the president can’t be bothered to declare a state of emergency and send in FEMA and the National Guard. It’s not normal to watch the National Guard patrolling the street after a big storm, pointing their guns at dogs and families standing in their own yards past curfew even though it’s too hot to stay inside without so much as a refrigerator to stand next to or a fan to cool you down. It’s not normal for your neighborhood streets to be occupied by the people who make a living going to battle in foreign places to supposedly protect your family and their families and every family at home.

It’s not normal to my fiancé, but it was normal to me and not disturbing in the least. All those events just meant: summer was ending. They just meant: that summer, a pretty bad storm came on through.

It’s amazing what can seem normal to a kid born into it. Like when my dad told me about the two times he shot his gun in his whole life. I didn’t know before that conversation that Dad had smuggled in drugs from the 1970s and dealt cocaine all the way through the mid-80s. I knew my dad as a Florida park ranger and a fire alarm salesman. I knew my dad as a beer-bellied, regular, nuclear-family dad, a goofball who pretended he didn’t know he was wearing his boxers over his pajama pants on Sunday mornings, who dressed up as the derpy sidekick, Smee, not Captain Hook, when the whole family did Peter Pan one Halloween, who told us: I’m a salesman now, but before you were born, I was a pirate.

Still, when Dad said he once shot his gun in Colombia after his good buddy was murdered, I wasn’t surprised. He told me the last time he shot his gun, he got arrested for attempted murder because his plan to shoot up his sister-in-law’s house with nobody inside had failed—her older daughter was there and terrified though otherwise unharmed after the bullets sprayed through the windows, the kitchen, the front door. He told me he’d do it all again, knowing the outcome, because it worked: his sister-in-law left Florida. He’d chased her out, and good riddance. He believed if she stayed, she’d finish the job she started when she shot his brother in the back of the head, leaving him alive but significantly disabled for the rest of his life.

I wasn’t surprised about that story either, even though my dad was not a violent guy. His voice boomed when he was frustrated with utility companies overcharging him. His jaw stiffened when he and Mom argued, but he listened to her quietly, and, after a while, he had to walk around the neighborhood to cool down. Dad wasn’t aggressive or easily frustrated. He tried to be a problem solver. He sighed a lot when he was upset, or he needed space to think, to reason, and he’d always return with a plan. Dad wasn’t the type of Florida man you’d expect to get arrested for pretty much anything. He was clean-cut, professional, working his ass off to support his family.

Still, his family lived in the Deep South for at least five generations before him, most of them working poor, a family filled with as many criminals as police and politicians.

Law and ethics and honor were subjects that burned hot in our family, probably because our family was carried through time by the helplessness of poverty in a hostile environment, cities that could be identified on timelines of destruction, from hurricanes to tornadoes to economic devastation. Helplessness, and the reaction to it, defined Dad’s side of my family. Given the way the world whipped them, given the way the people with the power and the money failed them, who could blame them for their reliance on blood justice?

If your city and your life are defined by a timeline of destruction and loss, who wouldn’t want to own a war machine that fits in the palm of your hand?

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Gunpowder war weapons were born in China in the tenth century. They were spears or lances fixed with gourds and filled with gunpowder and pellets or shrapnel. Using them had a high potential for injury, so I imagine one had to think pretty hard about the consequences and the reasons for shooting before setting the gunpowder to light. The shapes of those weapons might seem crude to us now, but at the time, I imagine they were pure magic strung with the hope of winning some battle, protecting some land, going home faster to the family you yearned for. Aren’t the best weapons always born with that idea in mind? To protect and maintain the home, the children, the family, our hearts?

Why, then, is it that the modern gun is so often turned toward domestic loves, the ones we are charged to protect, the ones who, if given the opportunity, would very likely protect us in return? Why, on the night of Jesse’s death, did her stepfather take the time to walk away from an argument to retrieve his Colt .45? He did not have to. He had asked his wife to leave the house, and she was trying to do just that.

The rumors of what happened to Jesse haunted me for decades. Reading the truth of her death, I did not feel soothed or satisfied. I felt surprised because the rumors that circulated through the small town of Gulf Breeze, Florida, nearly exactly matched the scene described in the police report. I felt something heavy at the bottom of my throat, and I understood for the first time why people say my heart was in my throat.

Reading a story like this is an exercise in helplessness. Understanding the details provides no method to stop the action. It happened so long ago, way back in November of 2000.

Understanding the details cannot change them and cannot prevent them from happening again. If prevention were possible, gun deaths would be declining, but they are and have pretty much always been on the rise.

It is so easy to make use of a modern gun, thanks to Colt and Gatling and so many other scientists and inventors, mostly men, who were driven to shrink down the power of a whole war into a piece of metal that fit in their hands. Jesse’s father decided on that power fast, left the room to retrieve it. The space away from his wife didn’t stop him. If he had any waves of doubt, they weren’t strong enough to stop him.

He probably felt powerless, Fernando says when I tell him Jesse’s story, when I believe that telling Jesse’s story out loud just once might help me understand why I am so haunted by it. Fernando makes it clear that he’s not explaining or defending. Both of our eyes are red from the heartbreak of it, even though he never met Jesse, even though I barely knew her when she died. Both of us are parents to our collective four children, ranging in age from eleven years old to twenty-seven. We both have worked with middle schoolers and young adults at the community college. We both have a soft spot for the kids who vibe like Jesse, the way she puffed up her chest all grit and macho and did hard things, like kicking ass on the guys' football team, even though they bullied her endlessly.

They are so vulnerable and they don’t even know it, Fernando says or I say when we meet one of those kids with a chip on their shoulder, a kid trying hard to show up strong inside of whatever brutality they’re facing.

When I tell Fernando Jesse’s story, we don’t say it, but we’re both awake inside that moment of hardening vulnerability, the way I learned that my mother was the least safe person in my world, even though she was supposed to be my only protector after Dad died, the way Fernando learned over and over that he could trust American police as little as he trusted the New York street gangs in the mid-80s when he immigrated to this country, the way all kids who grew up with violence are let down by the stories they were told about safety, comfort, and home.

I ask Fernando, Why do men do this? Isn’t the evolutionary value of that aggro thing that it functions like a battery for protecting your family? I ask Fernando this as if one guy can speak for all men, as if being a man is the deciding factor for this kind of violence. Fernando shrugs and says that maybe it’s about a loss of control. He wipes his eyes. I try to imagine the reality of such a desolate need to control another human body. I try to imagine myself as desolate as the men and women in my life who have done things like that.

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There are so many eras of the firearm, and for the first nine hundred years or so of its history, development was slow. There were muskets and match-lock guns that sometimes blew backward into your face, some you couldn’t use in wind or rain. Guns were heavy. Guns had to be managed with two people or more. Guns had to be held over your shoulder, held against your face, held with both hands. Guns were cumbersome, even when local blacksmiths could make you your own handgun. They were so cumbersome it made them unpopular. Weapons that required skill were preferable, like the long bow or some kind of sword. I imagine there’s a lost art or ethos in learning the skill of those deadly weapons. I imagine the individuals who learned those skills felt, at least a little bit, like they earned the opportunity to take their enemy’s life.

When whole armies lacked the skill to wield better weapons, the need to win or at least battle better lit up invention. Like much of human technology, lack and desperation inspired a new world. The technology of firearms is the shattering kind. It remakes the world by destroying it, just like a city trying to be another city, like a hurricane, like an unachievable dream millions of people will work themselves to death on the slim hope of achieving.

It’s not the gun’s fault. It’s just metal in a box, hopefully locked away. Millions of boxes filled with metal, hopefully locked away. Fernando reassures me, describing the unbreakable locks on the box he will invest in if he ever buys a gun. I remain terrified of the potential, terrified and desperate not to be haunted by the heavy potential of this thing in some box in my home. I am terrified and we are all terrorized by the truth that while desperation and the heartbreaking urge to protect our dearest families, our children, our homes seemed to burn the modern gun into the hands of millions of people on this planet, the desperation that follows a world shattered by guns doesn’t stop people from shooting them.

The box is always temporary, and locks are defined by their capacity for breaking.