And it is closer.

In high school it happened on the other side of the country. A classmate, a quiet, sweet guy, had to stop wearing his trench coat because of the looks he was getting. More security was instituted in our institutions, but it was still so far away. A fluke.

A year after I graduated from college, it happened at another Virginia campus. Most of my friends had graduated, but our community had students away from home there. Seemed that we should do something. Not as far.

In graduate school I was teaching children’s literature to future elementary educators in the heartland and pregnant with my first child. Children were gunned down in a classroom not unlike my mother’s, a kindergarten teacher. Blood ran near our coast as I missed the ocean. I sat on the couch when I got home from campus, crying and wondering when we might do something. It was getting closer to the classrooms of those that I loved and taught.

Festivals, movie theaters, concerts, malls, all changing our hearts, making us think, feeling closer and closer. Still we did nothing.

In Hampton Roads, the seven cities, so close that people work and play and drive and love all intermingled, at a building I had visited when working there. People died in Virginia Beach and I hear through the grapevine it includes a family member of a fellow college alum. Closer still, a sigh of relief for my family and yet grief for where I grew up.

Today, in a city that has stolen my heart in the two years we’ve been here, it happened again. A Walmart 17 miles from the Walmart I bought groceries at this week, less miles than lives lost. A shopping mall on lockdown where I’ve shopped with my children in tow. I sat in a fast food restaurant in a different part of the city with a new friend, watching our children play and listening to the sounds of all our phones buzz with alerts, and warnings to “shelter in place” and our spouses and parents and grown children and friends calling to say, “You’re okay, right? You weren’t there, right?”

And it grows closer. We need a change, but not a change rooted in fear that makes us leave these places so important to us, rather a change that lets us be there freely. I hate explaining to my children what to do, but we will have another family conversation.

It grows closer and closer, too close to the places and people and things that we love. We must act.

It has always been too close for someone.