The candle wax dripped onto my fingers, stinging, but I didn’t let go. The flame trembled in the night air, caught between gusts and silence. Around me, dozens of voices hummed in low prayer, the kind of sound that seemed less about God and more about grief itself.
I had stood no more than thirty feet from him as he barked to a crowd hungry for outrage. I didn’t go to hear him; I went because my roommate dragged me along. She wanted to see the spectacle. I wanted to study faces, take notes for my sociology paper on political fandoms. That was the plan, anyway.
But plans burn fast when a man is shot in front of you.
The sound cracked the air, sharp and obscene, and people scattered like startled birds. I remember the smell—burnt popcorn from the concession stand mixing with iron.
Panic swallowed the crowd. I don’t remember running, only that later, I was gasping against a brick wall with someone else’s tears on my shoulder.
The killer slipped away, like smoke. No one had answers. Only rumors and outrage.
“Are you going?” my roommate had asked. She stood in the doorway, arms crossed tight over her chest. “They’re holding a candlelight vigil. For him.”
I had laughed then, bitter and sharp. “For him? The guy who said people like me are ruining the country?”
She didn’t flinch. “He was murdered. Doesn’t that matter more?”
It shouldn’t have. But it did.
So now I was here, in the quad, surrounded by strangers who had once cheered his firebrand speeches. Some cried openly, shoulders shaking in the dark. Others stood tall, angry and defiant, flames reflected in their eyes. The night smelled like wax and grass and sorrow.
I shifted my candle to my other hand, staring at the small flame. My chest felt heavy, not with grief, but with something thornier. Confusion, maybe. Resentment that refused to let go. And yet, here I was.
A boy next to me—he couldn’t have been older than nineteen—leaned closer. “Crazy, huh? That someone would do this.” His voice shook.
“Yeah,” I said. My throat caught on the word. “Crazy.”
He nodded, his face ghosted in flickering light. “Whatever his politics… no one deserves that.”
The words hung between us, fragile as the flame. I thought about how quickly hate turns real, how it leaves behind bodies and vigils and scars no ideology can justify.
Someone began to sing softly, a hymn I didn’t know, and the sound spread like a wave through the crowd. I didn’t join in. I just held my candle higher, though the wax seared my skin, and let myself stand there—angry, conflicted, unwilling to pretend I mourned, but unwilling to walk away either.
When the song ended, the night fell silent again. Dozens of flames swayed together, a fragile constellation. For a moment, I understood the contradiction: that you could reject everything someone stood for and still grieve the violence that silenced them.