For about two minutes around noon last Monday — sitting in the back seat of a red Uber, whose make and model never registered in my head, somewhere on the 163, while I was trying to reach my five-year-old daughter at her school in Clairemont Mesa, neighboring the Islamic Center of San Diego, just after gunmen opened fire outside the mosque, amid frantic “please be okays” and what ifs — I experienced a moment of retroactive jealousy.
“Charming? How could he be more charming than me? I’m me. I’m charming.”
An old loop I hadn’t seen in more than a decade suddenly came back, like it had been hiding somewhere out of sight. The way my inner voice framed it — the feeling in my stomach, the back of my neck — was exactly as I remembered it.
About 13 years ago, in our first year of dating, my now-wife would often take me to Fred’s in Old Town, the now-defunct taco Tuesday haven. She once mentioned, almost in passing, a “charming” guy she had met there in college. At the time it landed harder than it should have — a fixation, possessive jealousy.
And then I moved on. I didn’t think about it again. Not until last Monday, when I latched onto the word “charming” in the back seat and the whole memory snapped back with it.
Frenzied, I dug into it. Didn’t she say she texted him back once? I’m sure she did. How did he respond — condescending, crass, friendly? Wait, did that conversation even happen? Is this a false memory? I can’t believe you’re thinking about this now. What kind of person are you? This is shameful, Noah. No, no — she definitely messaged him once.
“Was it a school shooting?” the driver asked.
Minutes earlier, when I got into the car, I told her, “I have a serious emergency. I don’t know where you can drop me, I just need to get as close as you can.”
Her question cut through, and I was back with my daughter. My baby.
Under acute stress, research suggests the brain can shift into an emotional, fragment-driven state, where older, highly charged memories can be reactivated and feel less like recall than sudden presence.
So, what does this mean for my daughter? The worst day of her life has now happened. What will it leave behind? If something as small as the word “charming” can sit in my subconscious for more than a decade, what does real trauma do in hers?
In the days since, she’s already spoken about bad dreams and expressed frustration with her dream catcher for failing to do its job. She’s said things like, “If you leave your door unlocked, bad guys will come into your house,” and “burglars can come into your house, put you in a suitcase, and drop you down the stairs.”
Other parents of TK and kindergarteners have described similar anxiety and trouble sleeping. A classmate told my daughter the next day that she “disagrees with God.”
The day after, the school reported to parents that 100 students did not show up. Thursday was shortened to a half day for the staff to process the week’s events.
The details so far, from what the school has communicated and what other parents have pieced together, are still incomplete. What is clear is that there was gunfire while some of the TK class was on the playground. An armed security guard at the school immediately initiated lockdown protocols. A shelter-in-place message went out to parents, and then there was silence for what felt like an impossibly long nine minutes.
Police officers entered the campus. One TK class was relocated within the same building to join the other TK class in a different area. Children may have crawled through the hallway.
My daughter was under a desk. She said the repeated opening and closing of a door frightened her. The Lion King was playing.
Dismissal happened hours later than normal. When we finally got to her — after showing photo ID, in a chaotic crowd of parents behind a fence, with a heavy police presence — she saw her mother and cried.
What we know:
Two teenage gunmen attacked the Islamic Center of San Diego, killing a security guard and two community members outside the mosque. They later died from self-inflicted gunshot wounds after fleeing. The mosque, which also houses a pre-K through third-grade school, went into lockdown as the shooting unfolded. All children inside were ultimately evacuated safely.
The victims — Amin Abdullah, 51; Nadir Awad, 57; and Mansour Kaziha, 78 — have been hailed as heroes for their actions during the attack, protecting the 140 school children. My family saw Amin Abdullah often after dropping off and picking up our daughter at the neighboring school.
We won’t see him again.
The gunmen’s purported 75-page manifesto has been circulating online. Its white supremacist ideology outlines recycled forms of hatred toward Muslims, Jews, Black people, immigrants and the LGBTQ community.
The manifesto fixates on height, describing being short as a “torturous humiliation ritual.” It goes on in similar terms before turning its focus to “hypergamy” (dating up) and “genetic cursing.”
Anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, and broader forms of bigotry are not new, and neither is misogyny. But reading the manifesto struck me as a kind of demarcation between my generation and Gen Z.
As a 30-something millennial, the “manosphere” I grew up with, as I remember it, was centered more on pickup artistry and the pursuit of women than what now feels like a shift toward “incel” culture.
During my college years, a popular and controversial book among men was “The Game” by Neil Strauss. It was marketed as a kind of how-to guide for social and romantic confidence. Strauss described himself in the book as short, bald, with a strange-shaped head.
All of this now feels like a relic.
Which brings me back to retroactive jealousy.
Round after round of mass shootings. What is left to say? What answers are there? I don’t think I even have questions anymore – just open-ended cognition loops.
On the ride home, my daughter screamed, “Why did they bend my earth,” referring to a school art project—a layered paper Earth that had been slightly damaged during the chaos of the day.
“You destroyed my earth.”
“It was my greatest craft.”
“Everyone destroyed my earth.”
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