There is a story I need to tell you, and I don’t know why I need to tell it.

It was July in Bolivar, a peninsula near Galveston, Texas, that has little to its name besides a drivable beach and the Big Store. My sister was young, maybe 8 years old, and playing with the dogs on the porch of my aunt’s elevated beach house. The house across the street was hosting a party. My family was inside the beach house, watching something on the TV. I think American Idol.

Some of the adults were sipping wine. I was drinking a Sprite since it was close to my bedtime. My sister walks in the door and tells us something happened outside.

I remember she said it very quietly.

We walked outside, and across the street a man had fallen, fallen badly. In the darkness his blood looked black as it trailed towards the ditch. We questioned my sister and eventually got it out of her that he had climbed over the wooden railing on the rooftop deck, grabbed two of the bars of the railing, and started doing pull-ups, laughing, impressing his friends, when the bars broke and he went down three stories and landed on his back.

I remember holding my sister’s hand when my dad went down to talk to someone, to see if they needed his help. The people at the party said they didn't want to move him because it was a back injury; they had already called a helicopter. My dad came slowly up the stairs, back to our own porch. He told us that the man wouldn’t make it as we watched the helicopter land on an empty lot nearby.

This is a gruesome story, a morbid story, and I don’t know why I’m telling you. I remember it now, but for years I never even thought of it. Children can do that—they can accept memories and lodge them away until something strikes again.

That strike didn’t come until February 8 of this year. This whole story, with all the morbid details, came flashing into my mind as I walked out of the library and into a night-time Virginian fog. Maybe the humidity brought it to mind; Bolivar is always sticky. I wrote a tweet about it, trying to get it out of my head:

Three days earlier, I had posted this article about numbness to violence that could come in terrorist attacks. Six days later, a teenager shot down seventeen people at Parkland.

And I couldn’t help but remember holding my sister’s hand, saying nothing. I don’t know what I was thinking in that moment. But now I wonder what it was like for my sister to watch him fall, to act as the messenger of death to the adults. I wonder what it was like for her to watch her parents, her aunt and uncle, all her older cousins... I wonder what it was like to see the adults in her life motionless, unable to help a dying man.

I wonder what it was like for a child to see violence, and then to see resignation.

There is a numbness in me when it comes to violence. I accept the memories, just as I did as a child, and lodge them away for a later date. But lately those later dates are not so much later; I can’t forget violence anymore.

But the helplessness of seeing a deathly-wounded man—that helplessness is still there. I remember the violence, I play it over in my head, and there is nothing I can do. Like my parents, like my sister, I am a bystander, perpetually watching a man fall, watching him bleed, watching him die, and I am not numb anymore. But there is nothing my feelings can do.

Thank you for listening.