When I was a sophomore at Mount Holyoke, my roommate had a boyfriend who went to Simon’s Rock college.

My roommate and I were awakened in the middle of one December night by a phone call. It was my roommate’s mother, calling to say that there had been a shooting at Simon’s Rock. She told us that my roommate’s boyfriend was fine, though apparently the shooting had actually started in his dormitory.

My roommate was, understandably, a wreck—as was I, for that matter—and the rest of the night was long and restless. The morning came all too soon, and I schlepped myself off to class and then met up with friends in the campus center to tell them about the night’s events. My memories of this conversation are entirely egocentric: I don’t remember what any of us had to say about the shooting, I just remember that I was a ball of nerves and that the mood ring I was wearing (hey, I was only 19) was black because my hands were freezing.

I was exhausted after the stressful night, so I crashed for a nap in my room that afternoon. I was jolted out of sleep by my best friend bursting through the door some time later. She had a completely unreadable expression on her face. In my post-nap grogginess, I thought she was on the verge of laughter. It was only when she opened her mouth and spoke that I realized she was on the verge of tears.

Two people had been killed in the shootings the previous night. She had just found out that one of them was her childhood friend.

What followed was another long, strange night, an impromptu road trip through the wintery Massachusetts countryside, tense emotional scenes, newspapers purchased and hidden away, a desperate search for comfort of some sort, from anyone or anywhere. The whole episode is something of a blur, though the moments that do stand out from that terrible 36 hours are some of my most vivid memories of college: the mood ring on my icy hands; the look on my friend’s face as she cried, “Galen’s dead!”; my best friend asleep in the back of the car, swaddled in my huge black sweater; Joy Division’s “Atmosphere” playing on the car stereo as we drove through the silent, snowy dawn.

My point here isn’t to say something enlightening or insightful about the Simon’s Rock incident, or about any of the other school shootings that have taken place since then, or about gun control, or about the modern culture of violence, or about the human condition. I guess it’s just that every time I hear about some new rampage, some new massacre, I think back to 1992 and my most tangential of encounters with a school shooting, and I just despair at how nothing ever changes and nothing ever gets better.

Three months, or six months, or a year from now, when the Virginia Tech story has been eclipsed by some new celebrity scandal or political imbroglio or outrage at the price of petrol, and the usual impotent murmurings about gun control have faded away again, someone else will go out and buy a handgun or an assault rifle, and they will bring it into a place where unsuspecting people are studying or working, and they will take out their grievances on yet more innocent adults, teenagers or children, and the rest of us will weep and moan and act like we’ve never seen such a terrible thing happen before. And the cycle will continue.