It feels like this. Just like this. When the whole world screams prompted by only the byte of a soundless letter, it always feels like this.

There is a tragedy. A mass shooting, an earthquake, a mass shooting, a police betrayal, a mass shooting. As Americans, we have our inclinations. You hear it from a friend and then you explore it and it passes through your conversations and you’re not alone. No one around you is. You know one or two people affected by the whole thing, though you don’t know them well, but that isn’t the point. You stop to wipe your brow and rub your eyes and presume that as the traffic rolls and the apartment buildings stand across from you, that at least the world goes on. You control your hands. You’ve promised yourself you’d stay off social media. Promises are tricky, though.

You pull out your cell phone. You unlock the screen. You find the social media app that tells you what the world is thinking, what’s really at stake, and where your investments have taken shape. It takes a minute to pop up. Your phone is slow. In the meanwhile, the street traffic motors on as if it doesn’t need you to prove its direction. The apartment buildings puff their brick chests as if they don’t need you to be proud of their congestion.

Your social media app finally opens and you start scrolling through the feed. It isn’t long before you come across one and then two and then a lot more posts that people keep posting about the tragedy. So many shared words about what happened, who did what, why it happened, why it shouldn’t have happened, where it happened, with tremoring responses begging specificity and clarity and can anyone get the details right, and these are the posts that interest you. Because it hasn’t been too long since the tragedy, please, but it’s been long enough. You’re pretty sure people should have gotten the particulars certain by now. But so many words are still stuck in rhetorical mud like horrible and whatever and disaster and America and worse than we could have imagined and what is happening to our world alongside oh get over it and there’s nothing new under the sun and yeah sure but what does it mean for me and yeah you’re right what does it mean for me.

After a while, one opinion runs into the next until they all strike you as skin that consumes a body like a treadmill. Like it’s all just the track beneath you, a scampering you once retained the power to fire on but whose emergency button you can no longer reach, and, in the speed that picks up, your only choices, to keep pace or jump off, both intend to bruise you terribly. You look up from your phone and have to breathe to be okay with the street traffic still stalling and braking and the apartment buildings still rising above you.

It’s okay, you convince yourself, and you dive into the social media comment threads again. You scroll, and you read the responses, one into the next into them all until answers muddle each other because no one keeps pace with the provocations that compel them. They just can’t. Conversations hurdle over other conversations, everyone convinced they can manage exchanges without the natural constraints of a tongue, because Lord knows it’s faster to process anxiety through bone and skin than past teeth and lips. Thumbs and palms translate all that energy faster. Everything else just slows you down.

You scroll because you’re sure there is somewhere you can offer details that alleviate the feelings. Perhaps even an enumeration of the feelings. A precision in the hyperbole that only bad things happen. You’re pretty sure that everybody needs you to not stumble into themselves, to keep them from replacing a tragedy of fallen children with a tragedy of unpasteurized ideas. Because everyone needs you, yes, you, to keep from overwhelming the dead and turning the tragedy into just another a book, something that evaporates after critics have taken hold of the ideas. But damn if you’re not finding where you’re needed and so you look up. The street traffic honks and flickers at itself. The apartment windows bubble like they can’t contain their pride.

You scroll through the social media comment threads again, and this time it doesn’t take long before you fix your attention to words that make you feel, someone’s declaration of What a tragedy, and so you give their comment a thumbs up. Finally something to ground you. And then you read someone’s But there are so many tragedies every day though, and you give this a thumbs up, too, though you’re not exactly sure if this diminishes your anxiety or affirms it passively. And then you realize that there’s something wrong with the mill because you come upon some weird things like Shut up about all the tragedies and then Stuff happens every day losers and then a string of  What makes this one so goddamn special, Yeah so special like was it even real, Yeah and how do we even know it was real, Yeah and is anything real really, and you start to wonder if feelings have the capacity to procreate with other feelings in a festival celebrating incest where mutations are bound to happen and deformities are possible.

You shake the phone like it’s not even real. You look up and the street traffic keeps crossing lanes and making turns, and the buildings keep waving curtains and fluttering blinds, all of it like we’re standing on a pier saluting the ship as it steers into the ocean. All of it even though we know there’s an iceberg we’re all just pretending isn’t there.

You start walking. You notice it makes the treadmill manageable. You choose to keep up. You decide you can and that you want to, and so you return to your phone and thumb back at one of the comments you’re not sure about, you type Did you really just say that.

You’re confident that whoever uses social media and participates on a comment thread understands the façade of the medium, that within contained boxes to type and a constrained volume of text to use, there’s always context beyond the font, an applicable ethos that we are responsible for presuming a compassionate meaning behind the words, because, after all, we simply don’t have the space to explain it all, and we simply don’t have the time to articulate the reasoning behind the reasoning, and you’re pretty certain everyone operates under the same rules, and you’re fairly certain these aren’t just your rules, and that even you are always faithful to your rules.

You shake your head when other people’s comments start talking back to your comment. You shake your head at everyone’s habit to scream. You reread your comment to be sure you didn’t mean what comments back at yours seem to think that you meant, and you reread because they’re wild, What’s wrong with you you crybaby and Who died and made you chancellor of the fucking internet and Violence is violence and you’re never going to stop what’s in somebody’s head and heart to do so go die or whatever and leave us alone.

You don’t mean to get loud at an intersection. You don’t mean to sigh something like Are these fucking people for real, but you do. At a red light, a father with his son to your right and a woman with her backpack to your left sideways glance at you, and then at your phone, and they seem to know what is and isn’t up but you don’t confirm. You nod at the adults even though they don’t ask you anything, and then the light turns green. You walk ahead. You’re just trying to keep up with the social media comments as they suggest that the tragedy’s victims are just playing hurt and then say that the cameras are everywhere and everybody wants to be on camera and then say that everybody’s just telling newspapers the stories that sell newspapers and then say that it’s just about the money, that it’s always about the money.

You don’t thumb back right away. The sidewalk starts to decline and you don’t want to trip over a cement crack. Even as the traffic eases and the buildings chop into smaller heights, you step on faster. Your arms have to start swinging in order to control your tempo, and you skip over a tree trunk cracking the ground like a seismic shift pushing earth into the sky.

You’re already walking in a neighborhood when you realize you’ve probably been walking in a neighborhood for at least two blocks. You’re fairly certain you’re almost where you need to be. Just two more streets to go according to your calculations. You have a job to do. The front gates. The front yard toys. The passing curbside mailboxes. The social media comment threads need you. They need you to prove how absurd they all are. Tragedy carries up and down the street, from wall to wall, like a cornered mouse, and when gutters congested in leaves and errant shopping bags all stranded by the last rainfall get in the way of a clean escape, garbage will stick to the bottom of your shoes. So many words you find are just garbage sticking to the bottom of people’s shoes. You have a job to do. And you’re almost there.

The comments keep rolling, of course, stuff like Death is all around us and The media is so stupid and This must be great for ratings and Can’t everybody see that all we need is freedom. And just when you think it couldn’t get worse, the intersection you arrive to bristles in leaves raining over a retaining wall, and the comments pour over the top and you wonder how much longer the game can run, and whether the score is too wild for anyone to bind the teams together. But you’re also just three addresses down, and you have a job to do, and so just as long as that is true, the clock has to keep running, too.

When you’re where you need to be, you turn on your live feed. The phone falls out of your hand, but it doesn’t matter because no one tunes into anything right away anyway. You pick up the phone quickly anyway and dust off the screen and introduce yourself. It’s all formality, but the world has never been lost over etiquette, and you’re not sure anymore who does and doesn’t receive these manuals anymore. You introduce the house you’re standing in front of. You confirm the presence of a grieving family inside that house. You point to the hedges, the fences, the garage. To the trash and recycling and compost bins. To the uncut grass. You imagine aloud how grieving distracts us from basic chores, how everything falls by the wayside, from window washing to bathing. You touch the shrubs. The dandelions at the gate. You affirm the acreage and the house number and the latch to get in, the vitals of such a situation, you confirm to your growing social media viewership, that aren’t unlike the plaque beside an art installation. You tell them you’re just trying to collaborate with the piece they all see. You’re just trying to explain it all. And in that vein, you have to confirm that you can’t deliver on the promise to interview the family. They have not returned your phone calls or emails, and you point the phone back at yourself so the porch beams frame the setting behind you. You breathe and say nothing even as viewers tuning in start to add up.

And then you exhale before telling everyone that it’s time to take a closer look.

You push open the wobbly front gate. You identify the losses that all the families have faced. The daughters, sons, fathers, mothers, providers, lovers, friends, dear friends, and companions. Standing on the gravel path, you confirm how families like these don’t need ridicule, that trespassing into their mourning would be a disgrace, that opening their front door would be criminal, that whosever tarnishes this family’s name on social media commentary only lays their own bodies to shame.

You ask your audience if they can hear it, the sounds creeping between front door and frame, seeping through the natural crevices in the house. You kneel by the door. You place your phone’s speaker and voice receiver against the wood. You point the live feed back at you and you confirm it all in a whisper. The family inside is sobbing, a crying depth so profound only wolves moan more wildly, especially when they can no longer find the moon to tell them where to go. This, you tell everyone, is no fiction. This, you say, necessitates faithfulness. Tragedy, you tell your audience, is always a clearer question than answer.

You point the live feed away from you to capture the curtains and the blinds and the doormat smothered in unopened mail. You point to the chimney smoke and the vehicles in the driveway. A jogger passes by and you explain to your social media viewership that one always finds people for whom the world goes on, for whom the world continues in sweat and sore knees. You posit that perhaps the density of a neighborhood’s runners identifies a ratio one extrapolates to make a statement about the spared, the fraction of a population unaffected by tragedy, something like three in every four or four in five or five in six or some other particular that feels meaningful and smart. All tragedies, whether mass shootings or earthquakes or mass shootings or police betrayals or mass shootings, bring meaning, and as Americans, we have our inclinations for mean, and after every time we have fewer and fewer places to hide.

You shut down the live feed. You tap off because you need a breath. Exhaustive work collaborates with extensive reprieves as strongly with anything else, but right then the jogger that had earlier passed the house circles back. She stops to check her time and sideways glances as if more than just measuring her pulse. She leans over her knees as if stretching her hamstrings, and then she coughs and spits onto the curb, and then she calls out to you. You hold the family’s unrolled newspaper as you wave. She approaches the wobbly gate and looks up and down the street and shouts for your name. You nod. It occurs to you that not everyone is trained in good intentions, that we don’t all receive manuals of discernment. And you don’t know why but your heart jumps a palpitation. You clear your throat and nudge your way out of yourself by starting down the porch steps. You want her to believe your legs can sway easily into any kind of question. After all, no one asks for explanations from someone who knows how to belong.

You have not invaded this family’s privacy. Their information is all over social media anyway. No one loses their youngest child in a mass shooting tragedy without television reporters obsessing on whereabouts and all the crying. All you really wanted was to capture this house, record its face, acknowledge its pain to teach sympathy in the context of the social media comment threads that need a classroom. We can all be steered to pity. Intentions are all we can ever have.

The jogger reminds you that the onus is on you, and she demands to see a lanyard or a badge or a driver’s license. Prove you’re not a spy, she says. Always these internet people with their crazy ideas like weeds.

You tell her that you can provide what you need to provide. And you nod. You don’t know what will or won’t assure someone, and so words and movements are always an experiment. Surely this jogger will see you’re one of the better ones. That you’ve brought good intentions. And so you tell the jogger that you’re not there to bother the family because at a time like death every good neighbor extends just the necessary hand and nothing more, And so what makes you such a good neighbor, she says, and you’re not sure how much to appreciate her third question because anything beyond two makes for an interrogation, and the sun is already strong enough. Tone is a weapon, and because it can just as easily cut through time and through bodies you tell the jogger that you’re not there to disturb anyone. But do you know them, she says, and you ask her if that kind of certainty only gets in the way. Then why are you here, she says, and you tell her that this family shouldn’t be bothered. But do you know them, she says, and so you ask her why any of that should stop somebody from being moved, which is when you notice that the adjacent neighbor is out on his front porch, halfway down his steps, a light, long-sleeved shirt billowing over his loose pants, and you don’t know why, but you start to wonder how far personal spaces extend, and whether or not breaking them down is a process with instructions not everybody gets a manual for.

The jogger tells you to leave, and you try to tell her you’re there to help, but then she tells you that you’re not a real neighbor, but you try to tell her that helping hands are all different, but then she says that neighbors don’t keep people away at the butt of gun, which surprises you because nobody has opened up any debate about what is and is not a tragedy, and so you start to wonder why she can’t see that you can only work with what you have, that you can only bring your good intentions. But then she brings the world on you when she asks you if you have a gun, and your eyes shoot open, perhaps uncontrollably, which you hope isn’t the case, and in that process, you realize you don’t answer her, and because hesitations can be their own kind of weapon, without one, the jogger pulls her phone off a bicep strap and unlocks her screen.

You can only imagine who she plans to call, and quickly, but you hope not too quickly, you reach into your back pocket and pull out your notebook. You tell her you’re at the house to account for last details, something of a ritual that local newspapers process to confirm timelines and names and the states of everybody’s souls. You shake the coiled pages hoping its flapping travels across the lawn, and you don’t know how much of it has before she tells you that she doesn’t know what to do and so she’s going to call the police, which alarms you because when you look around you, there isn’t a tragedy you can measure, and so you throw your palms up. You raise both your hands to demonstrate just how empty you’ve always been.

One foot at a time, you make sure not to trip on a gravel stone or over the weeds. As the impasse plays out, the neighbors across the street and to the left step onto their deck and the neighbor across the street and to the right gets to the sidewalk and the neighbor next door makes his way to his gate.

On the sidewalk, the jogger shuts the wobbly gate behind you, and even though no one’s fired a gun, your skin bristles at a tempo in the air made worse by the gate’s clamoring lock. You have a tendency to mumble to yourself when no one appears to be listening to you, and it’s then that you realize how hard it is to control a habit. It takes all the fire in your body to cool down.

The jogger crosses her arms, and you tell her that your car is way up the road but that you’ll leave for it now, and she says that she wants to walk you there, but then you tell her that you’re not afraid to go alone, to which she says that fear doesn’t have a direction when the world is as crazy as it is.

You see then the neighbors at their gates, all the way down the block. Couples. Singles. Strangers. Dogs. A plague whose only name is running talk, and though not everybody has a conversation, rumors have been known to travel without any wind. There’s the story everyone sees and the story everyone makes up, and oceans can’t always tell the difference.

Which is why you stop abruptly to reach into your back pocket because you want your phone to capture the street of stories, too, to combat these people’s stories with your own story because that’s the momentum that long ago set us asea. And it happens so quickly because it happens just like it feels, and it feels like your skin gets stretched and pulled off your bones, and you don’t know what to call what happens next except that the elements of the broken conversation you were counting all fall out of order, and clarity stings you in the breaths that you start to lose because, evidently, you, too, are the reason neighbors can’t reconcile what they have seen with what they are feeling.

First the jogger barrels into you like she’s pushing through you, and your only defense to hurl her aside surprises you because you can’t believe somebody can feel so sturdy and at the same time so light. And then the next door neighbor rams you, and you stumble trying to wiggle out, but the shuffling puts you on the cement beneath him where he shouts into the sky that you have a gun, that you’ve come bearing no intentions at all, and so you fight with open palms so the world can see how sick it can be when it doesn’t want to see. You’re in it thick, and you throw your hands around, but information fixes nothing, and the heat gets hotter, and you scream that you have good intentions because what else are you going to do.

You swing at the man’s neck and chest, and you scream about the mistakes they’re all making. No one listens, and how can they when everybody screeches to get it away, shrieks for someone to take it away, kicks your side ribs to poke it away, jabs your hips because somebody keeps yelling that they’re all going to die if they don’t grab it away. And you try hollering that you’re sorry for whatever you’re sorry about, for whatever sorry means, about your intentions, and that you only wanted to correct the record, to live feed and inform and alleviate the tension that exists in the world, but high noon is a plague, and everyone is always holstering a gun even when they’re not. And when the neighbors let up for a moment, you try to tell them that you are choking, but someone sits on you hard, and the coughing gets in the way of everything you can hear and everything you want to add. The weight of it like a poison of bad opinions that run into each other until no one can discern anymore one hand from another. And then you hear the shot. The one you’re pretty sure they’ve been wanting to hear all along. The one that they couldn’t have cleared their heads without. And then the world goes dark.