Two weeks ago, I sank my bare feet into the sand-covered floor at Kilroy's Sports Bar in Bloomington. A couple of hours after midnight, I walked with my friends down Walnut Street, a road lit softly by streetlights and empty except for the occasional car that whizzed by.
That night marked our last hurrah on these streets, our stomping grounds for the past four years. They were streets I had run on, biked on, even sang our school fight song on while trotting to basketball games -- Indiana, we're all for you. Some nights, I clutched my high heels and walked home from the bars barefoot on these streets as if they were my own backyard.
When I heard that 20-year-old Lauren Spierer had gone missing on these streets, tears stung my eyes. I didn't know this IU student, but we shared our Bloomington home. The area in which authorities think she disappeared was three blocks from my house. It seemed surreal. How could something like this happen on the streets on which I had always felt safe? So safe that when my mom handed me pepper spray my freshman year, it quickly became buried in my closet.
As a recent IU grad, it's heartbreaking to know a piece of our community is missing. Already, almost 190,000 of us have joined a Facebook group to spread the word. A near-constant stream of updates is posted on Twitter, and every time I click on a link to an article, it's with the anticipation that maybe this news will be good news. I, along with thousands of others, think every day about Lauren with the hopes she will be brought home safely. Lauren, we're all for you.
