Hokie

Hello, again. I’m quickly gaining notoriety as the biggest bum on Life in Labels. I’ve now been on something like 15 interviews for teaching jobs, and have put more miles on my poor Taurus than she can handle driving between Northern Virginia and Charlottesville, as well as Blacksburg and Charlottesville. No real updates on the job search, but don’t worry, you’ll be the first to know! (Or, you’ll be the first to read a vague update that says I’m working somewhere…like the North Pole, or Nevada. You know, nowhere I’ll really be.) I don’t want to be like this woman.

So, now that I’m finished updating you, let’s talk about something horribly delicate. On Saturday, it will be the 4th anniversary of the shooting at Virginia Tech, where I spent my first year as a college student. I debated this post for a while, but decided that the label “Hokie” (Virginia Tech mascot) was very important to me for quite some time, and Virginia Tech remains important to me. My little brother is a freshman at VT currently. My high school best friends graduated from there. I also experienced my first real sense of loss as a freshman there.

Now, for the record, I applied to transfer to UVA in January of my freshman year. This was months before the shooting. And no, my decision to transfer was not because I hated VT, thought it unsafe, or as a result of the shooting. Disclaimers aside, let’s get down to it. Yes, I lost (many) friends and acquaintances on April 16th. It was an awful, awful time for me. Every year around this time, I get introspective. Am I living my life in the way that I want? Thirty-two people were unable to live full lives on that day. Am I living honorably in their memory? Virginia Tech’s motto is Ut Prosim, or That I May Serve. It has become a personal motto, as well.

I have more to say about this (like the time I was interviewed on national TV), but it’s still a somewhat open wound for me. I’m not sure that I’ve completely sorted out my own feelings about what it felt like to hide in my dorm room with my best friend and hear the emergency announcements play over and over (something like, “There is a shooter. Stay in your rooms.”) I do remember that it was eerily snowing, and when we were able to leave our rooms around 3 pm to get food for the first time that day, there were men with huge guns everywhere. The sun was blinding, and there were a few last flurries. I knew things wouldn’t be the same for me, and they certainly weren’t for a long time.

As a soon-to-be English teacher, I’m always struck by the power of words. Nikki Giovanni, a poet and professor at Virginia Tech, had this to say:

We are Virginia Tech.

We are sad today, and we will be sad for quite a while. We are not moving on, we are embracing our mourning.

We are Virginia Tech.

We are strong enough to stand tall tearlessly, we are brave enough to bend to cry, and we are sad enough to know that we must laugh again.

We are Virginia Tech.

We do not understand this tragedy. We know we did nothing to deserve it, but neither does a child in Africa dying of AIDS, neither do the invisible children walking the night away to avoid being captured by the rogue army, neither does the baby elephant watching his community being devastated for ivory, neither does the Mexican child looking for fresh water, neither does the Appalachian infant killed in the middle of the night in his crib in the home his father built with his own hands being run over by a boulder because the land was destabilized. No one deserves a tragedy.

We are Virginia Tech.

The Hokie Nation embraces our own and reaches out with open heart and hands to those who offer their hearts and minds. We are strong, and brave, and innocent, and unafraid. We are better than we think and not quite what we want to be. We are alive to the imaginations and the possibilities. We will continue to invent the future through our blood and tears and through all our sadness.

We are the Hokies.

We will prevail.

We will prevail.

We will prevail.

We are Virginia Tech.

I technically live in “A House Divided,” but my heart has always been in Blacksburg.

Ross Alameddine, I live my life in your memory.