A stiff wind cuts across the cold stone squares as I run through the university campus.

Normally there would be hundreds of students here, camped in tiny tents, waiting to buy basketball tournament tickets. An annual rite of March.

Today it’s a ghost town.

The steps of the student union are empty, too – no students chatting while cradling their steaming hot lattes.

Simple cups of comfort.

Not long ago, they were crowding and bumping into one another along these paths.

Doing life the way young people in college do.

Or how they did.

And finally, I look up at the church.

It rises majestically from the bottom of a long hill, a beacon visible from many miles away, the Duke Chapel.

Oversized for this little tobacco town, it looms like an ancient European cathedral.

And today I remember Paris and Notre Dame. That magnificent icon of hubris that we cherish and clutch tight to our collective memory.

As a tourist, I never stood in line to buy tickets to go inside the main structure, I always sat on the grass in the playground in the back courtyard.

The perfect spot to get a closer look at the gargoyles.

Each figure, so remarkably detailed and unique – whimsical, weird, monstrous. agonized, laughing, snarling.

Quirky little ogres.

I remember reading about their history – how they are variations on Medieval dragons, and they were crafted to serve several functions.

One was structural – to drain water away from the main roofline of the building.

Another was to serve as a meme to church members of the Devil that lurked in the city – ready to pounce and drag them down to Hell.

Another was to act as guardians of the purity inside of the church itself, they repelled the evil forces of the secular world.

Yet the mighty Notre Dame lost its cloak of invincibility in a dramatic spectacle last year. The entire world watched in disbelief as the spire went up in a blaze of bright orange flame.

Sparks, like anger, fizzing and igniting.

Boiling, roiling, incinerating.

On and on, through the night, gobbling up oxygen as tiles fell away in fiery chunks. And finally portions of the roof collapsed into the belly of its own sanctuary.

Later, ruined, ravaged, wet remnants and grief.

How quickly the facade of normality can crumble, how our devout icons can be razed.

… how quickly the facade of normality can crumble.

Beauty and grace buckling at the knees.

Where once we found comfort and refuge, now we doubt.

Some nights, I wake in bed at 3 am, heart beating too fast, not sure if the fear in my chest is in the dream or in the waking.

For me, I wonder where we went so wrong, my generation. How we ruined things for our kids. How I could ever go back and undo, take better care.

I still want to believe that, like the little gargoyle, yes, we are tragic and grotesque, but we grapple with our other masks, too – charity and goodness, bravery and compassion.

For me, I just want to run and run and keep on running, to that safe place inside that has always been my refuge: my hard-won stability, my humor, stillness, my best self.

But today, even though the streets are quiet, the volume is turned up way too high in my brain.

There’s a jarring dissonance between outside and inside the body – the harsh clanging of the inane cathedral bells amplifies the disorder.

Good and evil, faith and fear.

And I can’t go in, but I know that the Duke Gardens is a fantasia today – vacant, but mobbed with drunken bees, rare specimens of botanicals and aching new life.

Beauty, ruins, remains.

Running, running, running home, no quietude, no answers, just noise.

• Photos:
• Marseilles, France
• Strasbourg, France
• Bern, Switzerland