Content warning: this piece contains mentions of gun violence

Today is Black Friday. You know what it’s like. The fluorescent lights, beaming down on you. The type of lighting that makes you look less than flattering. Lights that make you sweat under your November layers. The music in the store is too loud. The music is flat and tinny and headache inducing. You are promised deals and savings and satisfaction on Black Friday. Pictures of models hang on banners in the store. Models with unnaturally white teeth and contrived poses. If you bought the clothes they wear, maybe you could be just one of their pals. 

You shop with your girlfriend. The mall is one hour away from her house, and she insists on driving. There is a certain nervousness to your driving that surfaces only when she is in the passenger seat. Nervousness that she doesn’t trust one bit. 

You pick out a shirt you decide looks okay on you. She tells you she likes it too. She says she’s going to steal it from you. In your relationship this is common. It is something you adore. You don’t adore much else in your life. But banalities like this make you damn near swoon. She shops and you follow her closely like a pup to its owner. 

The line is so long you can’t find the end of it. People slithering between aisles like a snake programmed to consume, consume, consume. It spans from the men’s section in the back right to the wall of purses on the far-left. The conversations you hear in the line are all in relation to how long it is. Or deals. Lots of people talk about deals.  

And then you are hungry. She calls you hangry. The food court upstairs is the biggest food court you have ever seen. Chain restaurants galore. The lines are long here, too. People in the food court are split into three sectors: one third waits in line, another third is sitting and eating, and the rest of the people are circulating round and round, scavenging for a table waiting for one to empty. Some brave scouts ask nicely Sorry To Bother You But Are You Guys Headed Out? which is a question typically accompanied by a pointing motion with their thumbs toward the exit of the room. Others simply sit down on the floor. Today is Black Friday. 

You manage to find a table in the center of the food court for two. You are both eating orange chicken and pork-fried rice out of a styrofoam box. The chicken is rubbery. Only some of the grains of rice are cooked. Not that your expectations were too high anyway. The smell in the air is a toxic combination of fast-food fumes. It is how you imagine maybe a bazaar would smell like.  

As you eat, she questions you about a hat she just finished crocheting, a newly acquired hobby of hers. You tell her you love it. It is purple and fits her head nicely. You admire her ability to create. You admire a lot about her. 

You watch her consult her reflection in her phone camera repeatedly, as if she has reason to doubt your verdict of the hat. She adjusts the hat, rotating it a few degrees in each direction. She takes it off, tosses her brown hair in her hands a bit and then puts it back on. At a certain point she is satisfied and then she takes a picture of herself.  

*** 

And the worst thing that ever happens to you: it happens. You finish your meal, and you get up and walk toward the garbage can. And then you hear three women screaming. You hear them running. Their high heeled boots stomping on the floor like a stampede. You look up and see the bags they carry start to drop to the floor. Purchases lose all importance. You begin to run with these women and quickly find yourself to be amongst a crowd. Everyone is running. You are holding her hand, briefly. You feel her touch for a few steps at most, and then you fall. You lose her.  

You fall with quite a bit of force, and the way you slide on the tile floor burns your right knee. You land on a conglomeration of some condiments, and there is a stain on your jeans. Then you hear the pops. Then you know what’s happening.  

You see a man ten feet away tip two metal tables over. He hides behind them, shielding himself and his children. Surrounding you are shopping bags strewn about. Remnants of people’s lunches, too. To your left, there is a woman with a stroller. An infant is its cargo. She does not know what to do.  

You think to yourself Someone Has A Gun And Is Trying To Kill Every Single One Of Us.  

This is happening to you right now. You are in danger. No No No, you say, as though you can deny what’s surely happening.  

The shots don’t sound quite as loud as you thought they might.  

The shots don’t echo. Pat Pat Pat! is how they sound. 

And then you run again, or more like half crawl. Your knowledge of what to do in this situation is limited to Stay Low and Zig Zag. The back wall of the food court has a mound of people pressed against it. Paralyzed in fear. This is what utter chaos looks like. You say out loud to nobody in particular, Where Is She Where Is My Girlfriend. Waves of guilt. I Can’t Find Her I Lost Her, you say. You don’t think about what you’re saying but the words come out like water from a burst pipe. Pangs of guilt that physically hurt you. You cannot find her. She could be anywhere or she could be shot or dead.

  Dead. 

The fight or flight response was once taught to you in a psychology class. You think to yourself, Okay So This Is Flight. You are no longer in control. You know what it’s like to run for your fucking life in the purest sense of that expression. No hyperbole there. As in if you do not run you die.  

Pat Pat Pat! 

You know what it’s like to feel your heart beating in every inch of your body. Each individual heartbeat hurts. Something clanging inside of you. Like a bowling ball, rolling down a metal staircase. Your heart is a hammer pounding against your chest. Your chest is glass moments away from shattering.  

Where Is My Girlfriend, you say. A woman against the wall gives you a look that tells you she hears you. She is concerned for you too. As if you are looking at your feelings reflected back at you. A selfless look. You still hear the shots.   

At some point in a state of autopilot, you leave. You do a sort of army crawl through a horde of people until you are not in the food court anymore. You are pushed by a security guard into a crowd spellbound by panic flowing toward the stairs just past the bathroom to leave the mall and you leave her in there.  

You leave her in there. 

Your phone is buzzing in your pocket and without checking to see who it might be, you know it’s her. You don’t know where she is but it becomes your duty to find her. So you turn back. Against every natural human instinct, you run through a flood of people sprinting out of the emergency exit. Running against the current, you think to yourself that this is the first time you have seen an emergency exit used during a real emergency. And right now you’re not using it. You run back to where you escaped from. Back to where your life was at stake. Back to where you hope she is. 

And in the crowd, she is there, and her shopping bags are no longer in hand. Her face is simultaneously red with tears and white with terror. Her purple hat is now sitting crookedly on her head. What The Fuck, she says. She says What The Fuck Just Happened and you embrace her.  

You ask her if she’s okay. As if okay could possibly mean anything right now. 

*** 

And years later you live it all over again two or sometimes three nights a week. Flashbacks of that day. In them, you watch yourself in third person running towards that back wall where people dazed with shock sit motionless, reactionless, as though they’ve accepted their fate long ago. You watch yourself fall and hide behind a table. You watch yourself try to call out for her but your lips move soundlessly as though you are just yawning.  

The dreams are like pictures of you in an old photo album that tell you This Is Something That Happened but nothing else. The dreams are like the strange, immutable image of your father’s face flickering orange-red while lighting the candles on your eighth birthday that’s branded into your mind. A memory you’re only half-sure belongs to you. 

The dreams taunt you. This Is Something That Happened, they say. 

And you wake up in a puddle of your own sweat. You wake up panting. To wake from a dream so terrible that you truly gasp for air was once foreign to you. You once thought it was a cliché. Something that happened only in fiction. Now your sheets stain with sweat. When you get up, you lift your head from the pillow and its case lifts with it, sticking to your cheek. It’s hard to get up. You spend most days embraced by fear.  

And you give the shirt you bought that day to a college friend because you grew out of it. The jeans you wore developed a tear big enough to justify throwing them out. You break up with the girl a few months later. Things don’t work out.  

And you start to take the In The Event Of An Unlikely Emergency warning at the movie theater quite seriously now. You can’t watch fireworks anymore. Fireworks sound like Pat Pat Pat! Once on vacation you hear a group of girls shriek with laughter and you duck for cover. Shrieks of laughter and shrieks of terror are now synonymous. Walking through a food court now is a hell you can’t bear and you’re afraid to even fall asleep. You live like this now. You are the carrier of this weight.  

You know what it’s like.