I heard on the radio this morning about a massacre that happened in the states, where two students went into their school and started shooting people. It reminded me of the Montreal massacre in 1989. Specifically, I remembered hearing about it at the time... how 14 women were shot to death. It seemed especially frightening and strangely poignant because there were exactly 14 girls in my class at the time. That's like, all of us GONE in one violent explosion of hatred. When I think of it now, and when I think of the people who died in that school yesterday, I think of them like this: Yesterday morning (or an a cold December morning ten years ago,) those students got up just like I did this morning. They took showers, dried off, ate a little something for breakfast, and maybe some of the girls curled their hair or put on some makeup and the boys checked themselves out in the mirror, casually. Some of them wondered, as I did, what they were going to eat for dinner or whether or not they should put on a coat or if they should visit the parents next weekend. And when they got to school, someone quite carelessly and deliberately took those simple, normal things away and left only sorrow and darkness behind. That is why, this morning, all of the simple, normal things which I am used to doing every morning of my life made me cry.