what’s your name?

My hands gripped the wheel in trepidation.
I bit my lip – the tangy, metallic taste of my own blood becoming the only thing to keep me calm.

Sitting in the driver’s seat of my car, parked in the lot of an apartment complex on a gray, overcast winter day, was not my idea of fun. But I spent many days here, just waiting.

I watched, I observed – the four doors of my car closing me in, the only thing keeping me safe. But I felt anything but.

My rearview mirror showed a different person – a person I didn’t know anymore, a person that stayed awake in this parking lot worrying, seeing people being taken away in handcuffs when I closed my eyes.

The images came to me whenever my eyelids fluttered shut, inviting me to linger, to wonder, to ponder where these poor souls were being taken and what would happen to them.

There were mothers, fathers, young, old. Their faces burned into my retina – the shock, the horror, the sheer helplessness calling out to me. It gave me the shivers, made my skin crawl.

And here I was in the driver’s seat of my car, camera out, recording. I stared as the masked men pushed these people into the back seat of their vehicles. Gone. Disappeared. Would they return? I often would play back the last moment I saw them as if to punish myself or to just hold on a bit longer.

But there came a day when I couldn’t just sit by any longer in the safety of my four doors.

As one young man – he couldn’t be more than 30 years – was being led to another black SUV, I unlocked my car without thinking, opened the door, recording as I inched a little closer.

Without thinking I yelled – what’s your name?

Every person had a name. A story. A history. Ancestors. Family, children and people they loved.

The man raised his head and stared at me – a stare so brief, so split second but showed he understood why I was there. He understood I was there to help, there to document, there to make sure people knew, people remembered.

The gratitude he showed in that simple look, that glance really made my eyes water.

He shouted his name and then he was gone.

I rushed back to my car, shut the doors and locked them. Panic rising in my chest, my breath coming in short waves, I did a three sixty glance around my vehicle.

I was surrounded.