The Ottawa that I remember is a sincerely, and wonderfully decent place. The average person, somebody who might work modestly within a cautious and secure bureaucracy, was friendly, wholesome and responsible– the kind of person you hoped might live beside you.

There’s a lot of planning in Ottawa. Nothing happens without forethought in the city, and sometimes it feels as if life doesn’t happen in real time, exactly, but in a kind of cushioned, protected time. Parliament, in spite of being perched on a cliff and its jagged Gothic flourishes has always felt about as accessible and threatening as a Keg restaurant. There was just nothing menacing or intimidating about the place. It was like the Block Parent on the street, the home of a kindly couple that never had children and would always protect you when the local bully tried to steal your toque.

You felt safe, even welcomed there, like you might even get fed some Kraft Dinner before heading on your way. In fact, Parliament was so homey that a colony of cats actually lived there for years.

And to watch the city experience something as merciless and bloody-minded as the shootings, something that existed at such a terrifying remove from our comprehension and control, was unbearably sad. The rules by which Ottawa lived, that had come to subconsciously frame my psychological landscape, did not apply. The world that I imagined existing when I grew up likely never really did, and now, from the distance of middle age, I can see it receding quickly.

The eruption of violence, in a city that had always seemed frozen in time and almost magically apart from the real world, was a blunt and pitiless assault on the myths that have sheltered and nourished me over the years. It was like watching somebody whom had always protected me and I loved, getting beaten up and being powerless to intercede. A kind of chaos, emerging from a vast and dark pool, had descended on the ordered and good, and the sadness I felt about watching that was deep and heavy in the bones—the echoing gunfire amidst Gothic arches and limestone columns, a sound not soon to be forgotten.