October 22, 2002 @ 10:53 p.m.
Short words on a massacre.

Because I am not familiar with how well it is being reported outside of Victoria and doubt it has made international news, I will tell you this: yesterday at the Clayton campus of Monash University, a gunman opened fire in a room on the six floor of the humanities building, killing two people and seriously injuring five.

Monash is my school. Being an Arts student, the humanities building is my general haunt.

This has, obviously enough, hit very, very close to home.

I'm okay, everyone I know is okay. I wasn't even on campus at the time and didn't know what was happening until my father rang my mobile in a panic wanting to know where I was. I was in Borders with Deirdre, about to buy a magazine. I remember being in the shop and then staggering out to sit on a bench, making dozens of phone calls and answering calls and text messages from friends and family. It started coming together. He was on the sixth floor. As it turns out, he was in the east wing of the building, which is economics. But we didn't know this. The west wing is history. We have a lot of friends who study history. Some of them weren't answering their phones. I've never hated getting someone's voicemail so much.

Couldn't move from the bench for about half an hour. Tried once, could feel my legs about to give way, sat down again. Sometime later drove to Uni to pick up Annabelle, who'd been there the whole time. I was surprised by how many people were still around, although most people seemed to be pretty aimless.

We came home to try and find out what was going on from the news reports and the Age website.

I still feel sick, and like it's not quite at all real. I couldn't face going to class today. I found out from Deirdre that one of our friends, one of the ones who wasn't answering her phone, had been in close proximity when it occurred and is still very badly upset. People were leaving flowers somewhere, I'm not sure where, for the guys who died. The press were on campus all day. They started approaching people who were leaving flowers and asking if they wanted to be interviewed. People stopped going to leave flowers. Sometimes I want to gather every journalist in Melbourne together and smack their heads together.

There's a feeling of disbelief and grief among everyone I know. This doesn't happen here. Well...

I feel sick all the time, and I've suddenly become very clingy. I have to keep going and hugging people and checking on everyone in the loungeroom to make sure they're still there. Constantly on the verge of tears. Not able to think terribly rationally. Feel somewhat like a pain voyeur, because you know I don't know any of the victims or anything and I always scoff at people who get overly emotional about tragedies that they have no real connection to. But it's a hard blow. People seem to be expressing surprise that the exam period will be as normal; it starts next week. But what else are they going to do? Postpone them until we're all feeling safe again? That's not going to happen.

I want to offer some sort of condolence, some sort of record that isn't some wildly speculating newspaper article. I want to make sense of the fact that this is the second time in a couple of months that extreme violence has elbowed its way into my formerly peaceful life, affecting people I know, people I go to school with, the places I go.

I want to say to you, "this has affected my life." And you might shrug, because maybe you lost someone you know in Bali, or on September 11. I didn't. But unlike the above mentioned tragedies, the media will forget about Monash in a few days. But we won't.

I want to say a lot of things, but I'm not adequately expressing anything at the moment.

<<|>>