| Current mood: |  sad |
| Current music: | Diana Ross "Ain't No Mountain High Enough" |
4/16/07: The day our world stopped
I'm sure everyone who's reading this has heard about the great tragedy that my community, the Virginia Tech community, has suffered this past week. Monday, April 16, 2007 will never be forgotten and those who were lost, will never be forgotten either. Cho Seung-Hui decided to take many innocent lives along with his this past Monday. Our world stopped and Blacksburg was catapulted onto the world's screen. Town was bustling with media and parents coming back to pick up their children. My phone seemed to be ringing off the hook with relatives and friends calling to make sure I was alright.
It's been very weird, this whole week. It's very exhausting to talk about the goings-on of what happened on the 16th. At the end of everyday I seem to be completely drained, passing out in bed. I, as many of my friends, have been experiencing several emotions. At first I was sad, felt a little violated since this had happened in my town, at my school. I've never been scared to walk alone, anywhere in town. It's so surreal for me to believe this actually happened here because, not to be cliche, it's not supposed to. Then I started to move out of that and was able to laugh again, but would find myself feeling guilty for smiling and having a good time. It seems at night, I'd have come home from Ryan's and would be sitting, looking at Facebook, and would begin to cry. We've been trying to fix ourselves, talking about it with friends, getting our emotions and thoughts out to hopefully be able to move on with life this coming Monday. Like I said, it's so draining to talk about things.
The weather was simply gorgeous on Tuesday for the Convocation. Angela said the campus has a way of taking on the "mood" which the weather has. I think that's true. When the weather is beautiful, our campus is probably one of the most beautiful places you've ever seen. I'm so glad it looked that way for when the world was watching us. It's beautiful again today. Ryan and I went for a walk on the trail and then found ourselves on the Drillfield at the memorial(s). I wrote a note to Austin Cloyd, one of the victims, who graduated from BHS last year with Lucy. I told her from one Bruin and Hokie to another one, I hoped she could see our unity and see that Blacksburg really is one big family.
A couple places you may wish to visit are the: Hokie Spirit Fund and the April 16th Memorial Site
"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 sad enough to know 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 a rogue army
Neither does the baby elephant watching his community be devastated for ivory
Neither does the Mexican child looking for fresh water
Neither does the Appalachian infant killed in the middle of 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 imagination and the possibility
We will continue to invent the future
Through our blood and tears
Through all this sadness
We are the Hokies
We will prevail
We will prevail
We will prevail
We are... Virginia Tech."
-Nikki Giovanni
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