Life feels incredibly confusing. I’m unable to escape footage of the shooter walking around in a neighborhood I consider to be my home and safe space.
On the day of the shooting, I walked to East Side Provisions on Wayland Square from 2:00 to 2:20 p.m. to look for apple butter. My boss was throwing a Christmas party, I didn’t prepare an ingredient list for my maple cookies, and I had to go back to the store for what felt like the millionth time. At 3 p.m., I was at home baking (I ended up not even having the right flour in the end). Then I rushed to get ready, and by 4:55, I stepped into my partner’s car packed with my coworkers, ready to carpool to Massachusetts.
We were about an hour late to the party, so we went straight to making quips about my cookie journey, mainly attributing our lateness to poor planning on my part. The jokes were not landing. “You guys haven’t heard?” someone said. “There’s been a shooting at Brown.”
I immediately looked over at my partner, a recent graduate of Brown’s doctoral program and someone who spent several hours in the same building that I could now hear from a news stream on my coworker’s phone. We expressed gratitude that we were all safe, made sure everyone else I knew from Brown was OK, and I put my phone away for the night. Staying those first couple of hours in Massachusetts felt like the safest thing to do at the time. My friends later remarked at how happy they were to see that my location wasn’t at home during the shooting’s immediate aftermath.
Driving back home through the first snowfall really signaled how everything was about to change. I was brought straight into this sobering reality: We were all going to be forced to deal with a community tragedy in a national spotlight.
Since then, I’ve felt unlike myself: nauseous, sick to my stomach. I can rationalize that there is no immediate threat, yet I am anxious at every turn. I’m frustrated that I can’t live in the future.
Like most people born after 1990, I find myself frantically checking every social media platform on my phone to find more answers. Eye opinion editor Philip Eil’s post in r/providence about his post-shooting essay stood out during one of my Reddit scrolls. Maybe the answer was in his call to “speak, listen, think, and feel together”?
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My relationship to the city of Providence has been up and down since moving here from Detroit in March of 2020. It made the most sense for me to move here since my partner was beginning their PhD program.
Since moving here, I’ve missed being in a bigger city. I miss the diversity, my friends, and my family. I think that at my core I’m just a midwest girlie.
In retrospect, trying to hold Providence up to that standard was unfair.
After hopping around several apartments, we eventually found the perfect fit about half a mile from Barus and Holley. It’s a place where I finally fell in love with what makes Providence unique. A place that, like my beloved Detroit, has succumbed to bouts of gentrification but continues to hold on strong to its soul.
Since moving to Fox Point, I’ve felt more open to new friendships and opportunities to get involved in making a difference in my community. Seeing India Point Park full of people on a Sunday afternoon, hearing the birds chirping in the morning, and seeing kids walk to school all make me feel like I live in a proper place. It’s not hard for me to understand how that sense of serenity can suddenly be ripped away, but it is really difficult to actually feel.
I guess I’ll start this time with my feelings, which I have been managing by writing this essay and reading some philosophy.
There’s an immense amount of sorrow. I think that’s the root of the nausea: a communal sorrow. Streets that were once full of people trying to snag a last-minute Christmas gift are now seemingly empty – replaced with the humming of helicopters, bridge traffic, and sirens.
The loss of two young lives to pointless acts of violence feels collective, and it’s evident that we are all mourning.
I’m confused, unsure of what could’ve motivated a fellow human to do this. Not having any clarity on the situation only adds to the hopelessness we all continue to feel as a community.
I can’t bring myself to think how anyone could politicize a moment like this. These students were literally minding their own business, trying to study for an Econ final on a Saturday, an activity that just already sounds like it sucks. And what’s worse, they can’t even take the final exam!
I think of the parents of these promising children, letting their babies explore the world for the first time, now unable to celebrate their holiday return.
Simone De Beauvoir’s 1947 essay “What is Existentialism?” has really helped me understand those feelings. “I am not first a thing but a spontaneity that desires, that loves, that wants, that acts,” she writes. “‘That little boy is not my brother,’ But if I cry over him he is no longer a stranger to me. It is my tears that decide.”
At my core, there’s also this Hobbesian sense of fear. Everyone is looking at each other, staring one another in the eye as if to say, “I don’t trust you,” or “I’m looking at you,” or “I’m scared of you.”
There’s no real bad intention behind these glares. We all understand why we’re on guard and ultimately really do just want to catch the guy who did this. It’s unreal to go from completely feeling safe to seeing the same clip of a domestic terrorist walking in your neighborhood on national news. As they show him patrolling along Waterman Street, I imagine myself walking right past him, lost in thought, zoning into this really good song I discovered, stressing out about my cookies.
I’m mad at myself. Frustrated that I wasn’t paying attention in that precise moment. I’m aware that it was really not my responsibility to always be alert, but I feel like I should’ve been. The simultaneous losses we suffered here in Providence, Australia, Brooklyn, and L.A. have only served to accelerate the erosion of trust in our deteriorating institutions.
It’s important to acknowledge that these feelings of sorrow and frustration are being felt in other neighborhoods across the city (and world), and that this is national news because it occurred on an Ivy League campus.
This is conjecture, but one can assume that there are far more surveillance recordings of what occurred at the same day and time of the shooting along Elmwood Ave. or Broad Street or Chalkstone Blvd. than on Governor, Gano, or Ives Streets.
There are a lot more thoughts, feelings, and sensations.
But I am thankful to be given the chance to share at all. It really does help and makes me feel like whatever answers there are might be in these conversations with one another.
Maria Jones works as a regional planner in Massachusetts. She rents in Fox Point with her partner, two kitties, and tries her best to support righteous causes such as the Providence Streets Coalition. You can typically catch her on a dance floor.
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