On the morning of November 13, 2015, I closed the door behind the backs of my housemates. Their train was leaving at 10:00 AM; by 1:00 PM, they would be in Paris. The trip, this time, would be more relaxed than those we’d had in the past. Perhaps a stroll through Champs-Ėlysées and a couple of hours at the Louvre.

I was supposed to have gone with them.

I was supposed to be dragging my luggage down Rue Saint-Honoré that day, wishing my housemates were the kind who’d drop by the oldest bookshops established in Paris. I was supposed to be eating with them in a restaurant not too far from the area where civilians were shot down in the middle of dinner; I was supposed to be sleeping in a hotel that was 3.2 kilometers away from Bataclan.

Instead, I was in my apartment in Dijon when the news struck. Mere minutes ago, my other housemate—who was going to Paris on Saturday morning—and I were chatting with our housemates who’d gone ahead to Paris. I’d backed out of the trip days ago, but I’d thought of changing my decision that night. We were laughing about something stupid, about how the deokkbokki we’d made had 1/3 cup of red pepper paste and was too spicy. We’d logged off after that, with a “See you!” and “Take care!”

I was going through my Twitter feed when the tweets about the gun shootings in Paris came out. The next thing I knew, my other housemate and I were on our phones, checking up on our housemates and our friends who we knew were in Paris.

The hours after we first caught wind of the attacks were spent sleepless. We could not close the live update pages. We could not stop counting the dead, nor could we stop the growing sense of dread.

I managed to sleep, somehow. When I woke up, I had tens of Facebook notifications, all of them asking if I were safe. I told them yes, I was—but being safe physically does not equate to feeling safe. I was wary about going out alone. My other housemate had drawn up a list for an evacuation kit. When we stepped out to get groceries, I felt like something should have changed. But the markets were just as crowded as always, and in the faces of the people we passed, I could read no lines of worry.

I cannot describe the relief that we felt when our housemates managed to catch a train back to Dijon, how it hit us once they were walking through the door. We spent most of the week on edge, tracking the news a hundred times more diligently than we ever did before. On the Monday after the attacks, we stood in the entrance hall of our host university, spending a minute of silence for the Paris terror attacks. I shared the testimonies of the victims on every social networking platform I knew, as though reblogging a Tumblr post could soothe the pain.

The guilt I felt in the aftermath was irrational. I could not explain it even if I tried. It was ridiculous for me to apologize for something I had no control over—to apologize for not being there, for not being one of the victims, for not helping. It was ridiculous, but I felt it, and the guilt sunk in deeper when I read the stories of mothers who lost their children to ISIS.

More than anything, however, the Paris terror attacks reminded me of something that I had begun to realize while on Junior Term Abroad (JTA): That while I had grown up and struggled throughout the 19 years that I had lived in my country, I had been protected. I’d had a shell, somehow, a veil that screened what I could see. I had thought myself aware. But there is something vastly different about being in the middle of such an event, of sitting on the lawns in front of the Eiffel Tower, of staring up at the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel—something that reminds me, time and time again, that in many ways I have been sheltered. In JTA, I experienced the cultural differences that I thought I’d understood before, when I was writing papers for my Sociology and Anthropology class. In JTA, I learned what snow felt like, what sounds the French made to express “I don’t know”, and curse words in a variety of languages.

In JTA, I learned that things like cruelty and pain did not spare even the cities that were straight out of storybooks. But love, hope and faith were just as present, just as real, even when bullets were hitting those who opened their doors to offer protection to the victims. Across languages and cultures, these ideas translate the same way.

I would have learned these even if the Paris terror attacks had not happened, but November 13 cast them in a different light. It taught me that sometimes, those who walk beside us, who buy canned soup in the grocery and stub out cigarettes on the streets, are the monsters. Sometimes, the littlest choices we make weigh far more than we think they do. I know mine did, that day, when I’d chosen to stay at home.

Sometimes, you open your eyes and see only the dark side of life; but sometimes, when you wait, when you look hard enough, you see also the light.