Residual Damage

On December 6th, 2016, at the peak of the Christmas shopping season, six gunmen made hostages of everyone in a local coffee shop.

I was one of those hostages.

The newspapers would report that most of the men were young, that all of them were asian, and would make inferences about gang associations based on their tattoos, and I would hear none of it. I got to know one of them pretty well, before and after the violence. Before the violence, we were just two college kids in a coffee shop (I thought), having a moment. I got to know his brother even better.

It started, really started I think, at the bank counter. I was with my best friend at the time, Felicity Rothwell. It was a mouthful of a name, and it had taken me until fourth grade to learn to say it. There was no short form. What would you call her? Fell? City? Both sounded vaguely nihilistic. Sometimes, when she was at her worst, I did call her “The City Fell”. Because at her worst, Felicity with her long red curls and strong lungs was a shrilling siren with a voice that sounded like it would crumple even tall buildings to their knees .

She was the strong one. That day at the bank, she was taking out a loan to start a small business. She had lots of liabilities and hardly any assets, was in fact a college student in her graduating year, and told me without the slightest tremor in her voice that they WOULD give her the loan.

I believed her.

That day, I felt abnormally restless. My dad was sick, again, and my mother hadn’t called in a few days. There were voicemails from my brother and sister which I hadn’t answered yet. I was the only mixed race child, from my mother’s second marriage, and relations between us were strained. I had the strongest relationship with my dad. His skin, polished mahogany, and mine (which I thought looked like the yellow-brown skin of bad lemons but everyone else said looked like a golden statue) gave us a status apart from the world.

It was a pre-definition. A list of traits. A jumping point from which all relationships with us were understood. Even with our own family, who often acted like something else. Like bosses, in some unknown company.

If my mind wanders, stop me. I’ll make the story too long, and too boring. What do you care about the plight of brown skinned, green eyed, mixed race girls in a supposedly multicultural world? You want to hear about the violence. About the guns.

Still, that came after. I was in the bank line first, and that’s where I saw him.