Loyola’s campus is in one of the most amazing metropolitan environs. In nine words: New Orleans, the beating, pounding, bohemian heart of Louisiana. An entire tapestry of experiences is laid out before us, ready to grab hold of. There are memories to be made and friends to be forged and there’s always music in the air.

But at the same time New Orleans is very much like any other city from New York to Paris. It has its dark corners: those streets you don’t walk past after sunset, the pungent aroma of urine and fear rising up from the streets like olfactory memories built into the asphalt and brick.

And such it was Halloween night 2011. Shots rang out and shattered the fragile sense of security held on to by many Loyola students, like the fingers of a parent slipping away.

Now, admittedly I’m not a New Orleans native, and I’m sure a healthy contingent of my peers is not as well. But that doesn’t change the fact that, for the moment, this is home for many of us. For some it is possibly more of a home than our towns or cities of origin.

A home is a place of rest and, most of all, a place of security. From the painted caves of Lascaux to the flying buttresses of Medieval Europe to the piercing towers of New York, shelter is a natural requirement of the human animal. So when safety – or more the illusion of safety – is shattered, what are we left with but a shaken sense of who we are and what we are meant to be?

There have always been acts of violence, even long before we formed the language systems that would allow us to conceptualize the idea of “home.” Though we would like to exist in a bubble, violence still permeates our culture. So we can’t be too surprised when it bubbles over and erupts into our lives, whether from a flying fist or the barrel of a gun.

Now, like many of you, all I know of the event in question is a shattered remnant of temporal-spatial input from a variety of sources. All we get the morning after are hushed whispers, traumatized friends, the usual fallout and psychic detritus of an act of violence.

In all honesty, this is not what I wanted to write about. I wanted to write something facetious, yet honest; you know, something fun about how much I dislike backwards baseball caps or how unappealing Shia Labeouf is. But life takes strange turns and drops us off, grasping in the wet, cold dark for meaning. The stores all close up and passersby pull their coat collars in tighter, though there’s no wind blowing except for the foul wind of memory.

Life is so often led down paths not by the kindness of others but by the striking blow of a weapon or the finger pulling a trigger. We are only left to wander the wastes and signs of the next day and move back into the routines of life, the ringing pop of a gun echoing in the back of our minds.

Richard O’Brien is an English freshman. He can be reached at [email protected]