In retrospect, I'm sure I seemed a little silly.

I attend the University of Richmond, and when I'm not going to classes, I'm the "Assistant Technical Director" at the Modlin Center for the Performing Arts. It's a glorified expression for "Coffee Boy." I wasn't getting coffee on Tuesday, but I might as well have been. Summer work at school can be kinda bland.

You'd be surprised how a strange guy bringing a gun to campus can liven things up -- nothing like the threat of death to add excitement to an otherwise mundane day.

From the theater, on the Westhampton side of campus, we got information in steady streams of gossip. The Richmond side was on lockdown.  A friend of a friend saw the guy. He had a beard. He had bad acne. He had a gun. The gun was fake. The gun was real. Friends called our cell phones to check up. “Everyone knows about it. 
Did you see anything?”

We hadn’t, but that was all part of the fun. Everything I learned about the campus was surrounded in mystery -- nothing was for certain. That’s the game: figure out what’s going on. And what’s a good game without a little suspense?

And when my bosses and I heard that we should lock ourselves in our office, we turned that into a game too. Dig this: three tech workers brandishing wooden bats and stalking around the halls of the theater, peering around corners and through open doors with the care of soldiers in a war movie. Or maybe a horror movie; I kept picturing us as Space Marines in “Aliens.”

We got to the office. We checked our emails. We watched TV. We played Uno.

Like I said earlier, silly -- and why not? Everything worked out okay. No one got hurt today. No harm, no foul.

I have literally no reason to feel bad or scared … which is why I’m still trying to figure out why I do. 

I can pinpoint the exact moment when things changed, when the “game” stopped being fun. I was sitting in the theater, in the dark, all by myself. Safe -- all doors locked, all exits secured. We’d gotten word that the lockdown would be ending soon. And as I sat, looking at the stage, I just felt … off.

I needed to call my kinda-sorta girlfriend (it’s complicated). Tell her I’m nuts about her. Then my dad. Tell him I was okay. My brother next. Make sure he knows I love him. And my mom -- she works near the library.  Is she okay? What if something happened to her? What if I can’t talk to her again?

And all of a sudden it’s that old cliché. The plane’s going down, and all you can do is call your loved ones, tell them they matter. Leave them with something. I felt like a walking stereotype and I didn’t care. I needed to tell them.