There is a time in life when the sweetest melancholia falls to beating ears and frantic tongues. For me, that moment again reared its ugly head when, for the first time, I felt violation ripe and red and abounding on this campus that I call home. Virginia Tech is not but a vessel through which I travel into the world of business suits, champagne tongues and ardor; it is the place that I found when I was but a girl dreaming of peaks far taller than I knew and far greater than I could have anticipated before the blue horizons of these humble mountains became my place of wild expression and wonderful becoming. Virginia Tech became home each time a Hokie offered her hand to me, each time goodwill preceded annoyance or fall or flounder: each time someone smiled at me or offered the tinies slip of sage and sight into how this large, voluptuous breast of school and staff and color could impact me, could grow me, could fine and define who I am and whom I will become. And with the second week of sophomore year budding in the brilliance of this fleeting August, I, for the first time, was struck by fear in the arms of this campus that I so adore. We, Hokie Nation, received a threat of violence, of malice, an ugly wilderness of harm and crime and destruction. We were faced with the threat of another shooting and we, as all, stilled in remembrance to those 32 who still grace the monuments of textbooks and time and laughter that classmates and erect each time the day buds in our season of Blacksburg that hails like a trove of learned minds and laughter, of courage and spirits that stain our grass to field and a torrent of Hokies that only know the deep sweetness of comaraderie and the development of love. There is never a stranger received on Tech's campus: we simply do not allow it. Brush the Drillfield from your boots and come into the recesses of minds and promise and near perfect togetherness. This is the closest to utopia I have found and when it was put to threat my belief in the triumph of good grew exponentially. My classmates banded in a silent brotherhood; though I felt fear I knew togetherness in this race of time and torrent with the singularity of someone who has tasted the fruits of unity in such a way that Blacksburg bears them: raw, gracious, and incomparable. Though I knew this life was not a thing to be granted blithely or consistently, that my time may prove to be a fuse shorter than the fire that sweeps my bones each dawn, I also knew that each teacher and guard and colleague would fight for me and mine and this life that we as Hokies know with a resilience and unbound fervor only to be matched by the vibrancy of the burnt orange and chigaco maroon that so swaths out campus each day. I knew fear and sweaty palms and beating eyes. I knew it genuinely, but I also knew that in threat we hold courage; in fear we know humanity. In life we are Hokies and when threat scourges it's way to Hokie Stone we erect monuments of ourselves and belief of good and Hokie respect to a day so integral to our history that although we are separated, in part to time and place and pain, we are wholly committed to the pursuit of humanity and unadorned friendship to those who have tressed our campus and our world in what it is to be wholly a Hokie. I knew fear, but I knew assurance in those whose long-trod paths twine with mine each morn and fall on the abounding shoulders of my colleagues and classmates each Blacksburg night.
On that day, as always, I became privilege to the legacy of honor, strength, and the surest camaraderie that only a Hokie can truly know because alas I Am.
