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This month, as summer winds down, the box fan in the window doesn't cool the bedroom enough to get under a sheet until about 5 a.m. Blacksburg is sweltering through record-breaking heat as the students pour back into town and the wheel of time rolls us into another semester. In the midst of the heat and the familiar bustle, I keep stumbling over differences.

The oddest things spook me or bring a hot prickle to my eyes. A bang as loud as an explosion from the edge of campus at 6 a.m. on a weekday has me and one of my roommates both out of our beds, standing barefoot in the dewy grass of our front yard staring up and down the street. A series of fire trucks screaming past our house on a Sunday has me back and forth in the living room, peering out the front blinds on the edge of panic, wondering what new horrors are being visited on our town. Later I hear that the fire trucks were racing to Collegiate Suites to the aid of students poisoned by carbon monoxide. I never do find out what the bang was.

University Relations sends an e-mail to the Virginia Tech community, explaining that there are ongoing construction projects all over campus and that we should expect to hear the sounds of pneumatic tools. They sound like gunfire.

On move-in day, the last weekday before classes start, I walk to work past the stadium; the parking lot that's been empty all summer is full. A drum corps is outside the basketball gymnasium, keeping a steady beat. The corps is setting a martial pace with the rhythm of families clogging Washington Street, moving furniture into dorms as local church groups give away water and loan out hand trucks. I'm wiping away tears as I feel my feet falling into step.

On the first day of class, I eye students I pass as I have never done before. Worrying about them, fear for them competing against fear of them, fear of the unknown behind every pair of eyes. I almost turn around and leave on my way to my first class when I see the crash bars on the insides of the doors of the building the lecture hall is in. I look for locks on the insides of classroom doors.

I avoid memorials, concerts and television. Out of weakness perhaps, there is fear of the emotions evoked, or a weird guilt for having those emotions at all. I wasn't in those rooms where murders happened. We all deal with it in our own ways. The experience shared at memorials is a comfort to some, excruciating for others. The craving for information, the sensationalism of every detail in the media, allows some to feel a modicum of control over events while leaving others drained and exhausted.

The sense of Hokie pride is a balm for some hearts but leaves others feeling left on the outside, those that have never been to a football game or bought a Virginia Tech T-shirt. Some struggle to convince themselves that there is some lesson to learn -- that we should be nicer to each other or have more faith. They struggle to convince themselves that their kindness or faith protects them, that it could never happen to them.

I have a friend from high school who's been in Iraq. He took a sniper round in his helmet in mid-June. Miraculously, it exited through the headphones he was wearing and didn't leave a scratch on him. Not on his body, anyhow.

He toughed it out in the heat and madness of Baghdad through the end of July, when he sent out another e-mailed newsletter: "I'm being discharged due to PTSD [post traumatic stress syndrome], or at least that is the Company's reasoning. The doc here says I have some symptoms of PTSD, which is to be expected, but that I'm not nuts."

Now he's home in cool and peaceful Germany. He's been though hell, and while our experiences are light years apart, you may agree that his comments sound all too familiar. "So, that's it. I'm safe and secure, I guess; although, to be honest, the feelings of guilt and shame and trying to process the last year makes it all seem a little false. ... I keep feeling a viscous sense of something brewing up; something building behind the pine trees and the little pastel houses in the village. I guess it's all part of the process."

Pris Sears grew up in Florida, lives in Blacksburg and works among Virginia Tech's computers.