Kayla Wikaryasz

Three years ago,I learned that humans all have expiration dates and only God knows when we will expire. Three years ago, the day before Valentine’s Day, I experienced a mass shooting at Michigan State University (MSU) that forced me to appreciate the fragility of life, the human-condition of violence, and the scarcity of time.

On Monday, Feb. 13, 2023 a lone gunman entered Berkey Hall on MSU campus around 8 p.m. and began shooting students who were attending class. The gunman shot seven students, including Arielle Anderson and Alexandria Verner, who died from their wounds. Next, the gunman entered the MSU Union where he opened fire on students, ultimately killing Brian Fraser.

The gunman fled, initiating a massive manhunt — two hours earlier, I made a split decision that altered my future.

Mondays were long days for me as I began classes at 9 a.m. and ended my last class around 7 p.m. I’d make the trek to the north side of campus to spend my evening at the Union — as most MSU students did, and still do — though that night, I made the uncharacteristically, non-ambitious decision to go back to my apartment to “bed rot.”

I vividly remember standing outside of the Union weighing my options — my heavy backpack weighing on my shoulders.

“You should just go lay down,” I remember thinking. “You won’t get anything done tomorrow if you are tired.”

I decided to leave campus for the night and went back to my apartment. I had just sat down on my bed when I got the first “run, hide, fight” email alert from MSU, notifying students and staff that there was a gunman loose on campus and we were all in immediate danger. It took me a few days after to process how close I was to dying that night.

While students fled academic buildings, barricaded themselves into dorm rooms, hid in basements, closets, or under lab tables, I was sitting in a dark living room off campus listening to a scanner app on my roommate’s phone. Calls of “shots fired” popped off the scanner every few minutes making it seem like there were multiple shooters in the East Lansing area.

“Is it a terrorist attack?” my roommate asked.

“Do you think they can shoot us from the sidewalk?” my other roommate asked.

“We should stay away from the windows,” I responded.

In reality, a flood of terrified students probably called all at once when they got the “run, hide, fight” alerts — imagine 15,000-plus twenty-something students, stacked on top of each other in dining halls, dorm rooms, lecture halls — every corner of campus — with wide eyes, racing hearts, and a crashing sense of reality that their own life might end that night.

At the time of the tragedy, my peers and I were all at maturity levels which allowed us to be enrolled in competitive and demanding degrees — yet, most of us could not set up a doctor’s appointment without our parents’ help. The sick dichotomy is that as a collective, MSU faced a cataclysm: students were being molded into a highly-effective workforce that did not have the emotional intelligence to deal with actual life. That night, we all received a crash course in tragedy.

Back in my apartment, lights from the helicopters surveying the East Lansing area for the gunman trickled through cheap window blinds, making our living room floor flicker and sparkle like the bar floors do on a Saturday night on Grand River Avenue — a reminder that every night at MSU can be a party.

My one roommate nibbled on edibles, sipped on an IPA, and cried. My other roommate puffed on her vape and Facetimed her sister. I paced the hallway and texted everyone I knew who lived on campus – no one responded.

Later that night we learned that a terrorist attack was not occurring — we breathed a little easier. Around 1 a.m., 911 dispatch said over the scanner that a man had shot himself when approached by police officers — we all cheered like we did when we were little girls on the playground. We knew it was all over.

We cheered, though blood stained our classrooms, our dining halls, and the sidewalk just a few blocks from our apartment complex. We cheered like it was a game — we cheered like no one ever actually dies.

In some ways, no one did die that night though three young people left this world a little earlier than the rest of us. Once you become a Spartan, you bleed green, not red — your memory becomes everyone’s memory. I didn’t know anyone who was shot or who had died in the sense that we were close friends or hung out. However, I did know the victims because they were me.

I am a fickle writer, in that I rarely have the motivation to write until all the thoughts bottle up inside of me and I am forced to make the words real and not just anomalous thoughts.

For some reason, the morning of the shooting, I decided to journal between classes. I do not remember why I decided to journal, but I did.

I will leave you, dear reader, with the following excerpt from what I wrote that morning, long before I knew how my life was going to change. I do not know what these words are supposed to mean, or if they are supposed to be prophetic at all. All I know is that these words I wrote that morning seem to point to a lesson I was supposed to learn that night, and of which I am still trying to process:

I generally feel like whatever I’m doing here — whatever I am learning — is going to improve my future.

To get through the days, I think of my great-grandmother — if she could survive what she survived, then I can too.