By Marielle Villar Martiney (EMPA ’23)

After two years of restrictions, I am now free to eat at my favorite French restaurant (Sweetwater in Williamsburg), visit Broadway, and travel without having to show my vaccination pass or wear a mask.

But I also compulsively look for places to hide and seek out emergency exits.

I survived my COVID-19 isolation only to be terrified that at any moment, in any public setting, I might be murdered in a mass shooting. I do not feel free.

At the beginning of COVID-19, like many New Yorkers, I was fearful and worried for the safety of my loved ones. News broadcasts seared images of patients on ventilators into my memory. An older relative and a former colleague and friend died from COVID-19. As someone with asthma, I undertook every precaution possible as I coordinated community check-ins and emergency food distributions: I wore a double mask, obsessively used hand sanitizer, and would throw my clothes into the laundry and take a shower immediately after coming home. 

Despite my precautions, my worst fear came true, and I was eventually bedridden with COVID-19 in May 2022, one month before my post-COVID wedding celebration. 

This year, also in quick succession, the existential scares continued: I was exposed to heavy metal poisoning from my apartment’s water pipes, and my younger sister and her fiancé were hospitalized in a car accident. But none of these events provoked unadulterated terror for me.

Instead, when simply going about my normal routines, I was terrified. So, what made the difference?

My first shock of terror was on New Jersey Transit. My husband and I were on our way to visit my parents for Easter. It was less than one week after the mass subway shooting on April 12 that injured 29 people in Brooklyn, where we live. A man strolled leisurely into our NJ Transit train car wearing a bulky black vest with dozens of blue, red, and green wires sprouting around his chest and head. An icy and instant burst of terror started in my chest and radiated outwards throughout my body, distinct and separate from either fear or adrenaline. 

I promptly exclaimed, “Our stop is next!” as my husband and I left to find a conductor. (See something, say something.) Thinking to myself repeatedly, “Today is not the day I die,” we were relieved to learn that the man was wearing an electrocardiogram machine, which is a medical device designed to monitor the heart.

Soon after the Uvalde school and Buffalo grocery store massacres this May, I was in an Uber that was tailgating a motorcycle with two passengers on a winding, rural road. A bout of road rage started between my Uber and the motorcycle. Each driver gestured aggressively at the other and there were no other cars around. 

After 10 or 15 minutes of increasing hostility, the motorcycle passenger turned to face our car and proceeded to stare us down. He then reached into his black jacket pocket, and I felt an unexpected jolt of terror race through my body. 

I crouched down in my seat and held my breath.

The passenger pulled out a phone. I shakily began to breathe again.

In June, I rode the subway to Midtown Manhattan during rush hour. A man seated across from me was fiddling incessantly with his black oversized duffel. When he opened his bag, my heart felt like it stopped. He retrieved a water bottle. 

It is odd to consider my asymmetrical resilience: COVID-19 killed and impoverished my loved ones, yet a simple subway ride with a bulky sports bag will subconsciously summon deep, immediate, and unexpected terror. 

And this is a new terror. I do not remember growing up as a kid, even post-9/11, and being terrified of mass shootings at school, church, movie theaters, or grocery stores.

Stranger still, I only feel this unexpected terror in the United States. From July to August, I traveled internationally and, thankfully, my terror stopped. Using public transportation in England, France, Italy, and the Netherlands did not conjure images of mass shootings. In May of this year, Bloomberg reported that gun violence deaths in the U.S. are more than ten times that of rich European nations.

I am also not alone in feeling terrified about living my day-to-day existence under the oppression of gun violence in the United States. Americans I met while in Europe also observed how “we don’t have to worry about guns here.” 

Mass shootings are a uniquely American problem, and so too, it seems, are the terrified and traumatized people it leaves in its wake.

In Greece, unexpected fireworks outside our taverna were met with annoyed amusement and laughter by the Europeans around our table, but they also left my husband and I looking for the nearest place to hide. Back home in Brooklyn when we hear loud popping noises, we play a guessing game: “Is it fireworks or is it guns?”

In a post-COVID world, living under the threat of gun violence is not my definition of freedom. 

Marielle Villar Martiney (EMPA ’23) is a New Yorker studying sustainability management.