Pulse, June Twelve, Two Thousand Sixteen

In the early morning hours of June twelve, two thousand sixteen, a gunman entered Pulse nightclub on South Orange Avenue in Orlando and opened fire. Pulse was a gay nightclub, and that Sunday was Latin night. The people inside were mostly young, mostly Latinx.

It was Pride month. Many of them had come to dance. Forty-nine people were killed that night.

More than fifty others were wounded. It was, at the time, the deadliest mass shooting in American history. The names of the forty-nine were read aloud over the days that followed, in vigils in Orlando and in cities across the country: names like Edward Sotomayor, Stanley Almodovar, Luis Omar Ocasio-Capo, Juan Ramon Guerrero.

Young people. Dancers. People who had been somewhere they felt safe being themselves.

The Orlando community's response in the hours and days after was immediate and remarkable. Blood donation lines stretched for hours. Restaurants and neighbors delivered food.

The Dr. Phillips Center for the Performing Arts opened its doors as a family support center. The outpouring did not erase the loss or the grief, but it was real, and it was documented.

In the years since, Pulse has been the subject of a fierce and still-unresolved public conversation about what it should become: a memorial, a museum, a green space. The onePULSE Foundation has been working toward a permanent national memorial and museum. The site on South Orange Avenue, where the building still stands, draws visitors who leave flowers, photographs, and messages at a chain-link fence that has become, for many people, the most honest piece of public space in Orlando.

Forty-nine people went to dance on a Saturday night in June. Their names are worth knowing. The rest is the kind of thing a city, and a country, is still trying to figure out how to carry.