On the morning of June 12, 2016, a Sunday, I woke up in my Manhattan apartment to see several missed calls and voice messages from my mother. “I need to know where you are,” her first message started out. “I saw on the news what happened. Please call me back.”

When I called her back, she picked up and sighed deeply. “Oh, thank god. I know you just like to pick up and leave without giving anyone notice. I thought you could have been there. In Orlando. At Pulse.”

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My mother seemed to think she was breaking the news to me, but I already knew. I had still been up in the wee hours the night before, when social media accounts began to report the massacre, when concerned texts from friends started coming in. At around 2 a.m., just after last call, twenty-nine-year-old Omar Mateen had entered Pulse Nightclub on “Latin Night” with a semiautomatic rifle. He killed 49 people and wounded 53.

He shot people who had traveled to Orlando from Haiti, Puerto Rico, Cuba, Mexico, the Dominican Republic, and more. He shot a mother who would perish protecting her queer child with her body. He shot singers, hairdressers, nurses and photographers and literature students. He fired bullets into the flesh of people who wanted, for an evening, a few hours, a moment, to be free—to move their bodies joyously to the rhythms of Latin Night.

As the news of the massacre was breaking, I didn’t know the details of their lives. I just knew, at the deepest of levels, that many were just like........

© Time