I am out for drinks in Glasgow where a friend is talking about how he has panic attacks in the Sainsbury’s on Victoria Road. It is a bit claustrophobic, I agree, and when you are inside you do feel somewhat out-of-time. But I don’t have panic attacks in grocery stores anymore, here, I insist. Here, I’m not hyperaware of the potentiality of a gunman, like I have been at mega-groceries in suburban areas in the United States. Here, I am free to dissociate in the Sainsbury’s. Here I am free to feel out-of-time, not as in, I’ve run out of “time” - as shorthand for the act (or fact) of being alive - but as in, outside of obligation to a temporal insistence. I wander the aisles and select my fruits, wines and cheese.

The next night I am at a dinner party at another friend’s flat, we swipe brie onto watercrackers and pass bottles of red around the table, and someone, as anyone born in the 90s in conversation is obligated to do, brings up 9/11. I mention that my father was in the Pentagon the morning of, how he did not come home until nearly two o’clock in the morning, how I was one of the few children who was not pulled out of school that day, how my mother treated the whole event like a personal inconvenience. They laugh, amazed, Your dad had front-row tickets to 9/11? It is, admittedly, a pretty good joke. Yes! He was there. When I got home from school that afternoon, I went upstairs and watched the towers fall for hours while downstairs, my mother repeated this same mantra to concerned relatives and friends: Yes, he was there.

My friend from California visits me in Glasgow. We come home late to my tenement flat, a bit drunk from the wine bar. Blue lights swirl about the room and we look down to the street – a man is being slotted into an ambulance, a seep of red in a blot on his shirt. The man is not moving. The police arrive in droves and fasten crime tape about the section of sidewalk where the man was found. I search Twitter but cannot find any information about what I am witnessing. The next morning as we walk the same street to get coffee, I am astonished to find the slick scarlet of the injured man’s blood still marking the entryway door to a set of flats where he was found; two more sticky splotches scar the sidewalk. He was there. There was violence, here. In the days following I check the internet regularly for something explaining what happened, but I continually find no explanation.

What is the criteria for memorializing a violence – for disseminating a narrative that allows for an understanding?

What is the protocol for removing the evidence of violence in a public space?