When I finally returned to the Oklahoma City National Memorial, I was working towards my master's degree at the University of Oklahoma. I had decided to explore concepts of trauma and was drawn to the memorial for a seminar paper I was writing about spaces of healing. I'm not sure what drew me back to the memorial at that time given I had felt like such an outsider before, but I can only call it some kind of serendipity. When I returned, it was a completely different experience.

This time, I spent more time in the outdoor memorial, and I felt a sereneness as I walked by Reflecting Pool and looked at the Field of Empty Chairs. I finally left the memorial and entered the museum. I met a couple from Connecticut on my way in and spoke to them about the bombing. They had never been to the memorial before, and we spoke about our memories of the bombing and just shared details about our lives.

The couple was fascinated by the museum and found it powerful and compelling. Walking through the museum with the couple, I felt like more of a tour guide than I did a visitor. I gave them information they couldn't read on the cards—about myself, my memories, my experiences during and after the bombing. As we walked along, I found that telling my memories to this couple suddenly made me connect with the museum's materials in a new way.

The full effect of this feeling came to me when we reached the final section of the museum, called the Hope Room. This room is meant to look at Oklahoma City as it is now, at all the ways it has rebuilt itself. The moment I walked into the room was an epiphany. I saw Oklahoma City as I knew it, but I also saw me as I existed in that space at that time, as someone with pain and suffering who was also rebuilding. The Hope Room took my recovery and put it into performance, from the cranes above my head to the skyline of Oklahoma City visible through the clear windows.

The couple I was with left the room long before I did. My legs would not allow me to leave that space, not until I had felt all its impacts and seen all that it had to give me. For several long moments, I forgot that this was a memorial to a bombing. It seemed to be a memorial of my life, a space where recovery and resilience—and, of course, hope—were possible.

As I walked through the memorial, it became an archive of my own life, and not just of Oklahoma City. The pictures and videos and objects were not a static history, but instead a way of documenting the community that I was part of.

My experiences with the memorial have reshaped how I think of archives. Jody Shipka describes her perspective as focused on process rather than product as she calls attention to analyzing compositions "in ways that allowed me to see, and so to understand, the final product in relation to the complex and highly rigorous decision-making processes the student employed while producing [a] text" (3). This process focus is particularly important in analyzing my own readings and understandings of the memorial. Understanding the process behind the decisions the memorial makers made, which was the focus of the paper that brought me back there, allowed me to be more open to the final product than I was initially.

However, and most importantly to my rereading, during my visit there in college, the Oklahoma City National Memorial transformed itself in front of me. It went from being a collection of images telling the story and history of a bombing to an archive of my own, a reflection of my life and its histories. I was just beginning to grapple with the abuse I had gone through a few years before and had only recently started using the word "trauma" to describe my experience. I worried about this word—"trauma"—because it seemed to represent something broken and in pain, something so totally destroyed it could never be rebuilt. By not only examining the process the memorial board underwent but my own process in analyzing the memorial, I gained a perspective on the space I did not have before.

The Hope Room is the story of rebuilding. The memorial opens with scenes of destruction, of anguish, of lives ended or forever changed. But that is not the only story it tells. The bombing will always be part of Oklahoma; it is our experience and our history. But it is not only destruction. The bombing is also rebuilding and recreating; it is reshaping and retelling. We must be able to look at rubble and see how it can become Hope.