I didn't forget. I never do. In fact, I woke up with the usual sadness, the low-key dread of memories that dates and times remember and won't let me forget, but frankly I wouldn't dare.
I can't believe it's been thirty-five years tonight since my university in Nova Scotia decided to continue with the schedules and hurriedly put security teams and gates in place and checked our identification and our bags and pockets as we entered the theatre to write our freshman winter exams.
It was a mostly-female university, now peppered with a few males, as they couldn't discriminate, but it was heavy on equality and heavier still on feminism and women's rights and on that night we all cried as we wrote, knowing that only hours earlier in Montreal at a similar university fourteen women had been shot simply for being women.
Did it force a nationwide reckoning, as one publication proclaimed today?
Did it? Of course it didn't. Will it ever? No. I don't think. We'll still fight tooth and nail for everything, whether it's equal pay or a shred of safety in a familiar space but nothing ever changes.
It's Taylor Swift weekend too here in Vancouver and women everywhere are celebrating their own voices and finding camaraderie in the shared experience of being a women. I feel like men don't manage heartbreak in the same way and when men sing about it it's a difference you can feel. Maybe I can't put it into words but today I remember the names of the women who didn't get to finish their programs and watch their children grow up and dance to Taylor's music and it makes me weep.They should be here, living and loving life and it's amazing to me that we have all learned, much like in all school shootings before and since, how to live in and around the horror of those who hate.