where do you go when you're lonely?

Mandy and Emily make their way down the worn path. The sun won’t fully break with the horizon for several minutes, but the day has begun. The real truth is, it doesn’t seem to matter. The how and why, details of destruction, they mean nothing. Just that, nothing. The real truth is how you make due. They were trying.

The two girls could breath in the rhythm that carried themselves along their way, they could follow as their feet plodded the softly snowy dirt. They could wait for spring to bring them to a new day.

Here, she is not Emily.

She is not Mandy.

They simply are in this place of long-lost comfort, here they slip away.

The geese of Centennial Park have all flown south for the winter, someday they would return. Not because they would want to, they had to. Mandy and Emily would wait for wherever they were meant to return; when they could cease to be lost, floating noiselessly in the doldrums.

“I spent my life learning to feel less.
Every day I felt less.
Is that growing old? Or is it something worse?
You can not protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness.”

It may be significant that olfactory neurons are unmyelinated, making olfaction the slowest of all the senses. It not only takes the brain longer to perceive olfactory stimuli; the sensation of an odor also persists for greater lengths of time than do sensations of vision or audition (1996). The fact that olfactory receptors are the only sensory receptors directly exposed to the environment may also help explain the relationship between olfaction and memory. Could it be that olfactory receptors most readily receive information from the physical world and therefore are readily able to code memories for things like emotion or events?”

a big HAHA we sure got you! Oh man, that was a good one, they’d say. We’d all laugh at how terrified we were, only for the least composed of the three to break down in giggles. An innocent prank, no harm no foul.

They’d sneak through the back doors with their gym bags of surprises, splitting up when they hit the main hallway. Two would make their way for the cafeteria, the other for the gym. They’d whisper at how great their planning was, nearly the entire school would be halfway through lunch or in P.E.  They’d be the talk of the school for weeks.

With stern faces they enter and block the exits. Pull out the “weapons.”

Benson would be the first. He’d see McEllis and pull out the joke. He would look him square in the eye and from the tip of his gun would erupt daisies and dandelions and laughter and a great blurb that would float to the sky with ALL’S WELL THAT ENDS WELL dancing in the fluorescent bulb illuminated room. The shock and horror from the crack of his firearm on the faces of the people he had known since playground days would blaze into wide smiles and peals of hilarity, and it would be good.

In the gym, a water gun war would erupt and everyone would declare January 10, 1996 to have been the greatest day in the history of high school. The only tragedy would be that today would have to end.

Students would go home to their families unbroken. The police department and paramedics would never have stirred from their stations. I would not be writing this now.

I regret to inform you, hopeful for humanity, that there is no more to this story. Simply less.

“I’m skimming across the surface of my own history, moving fast, riding the melt beneath the blades, doing loops and spins, and when I take a high leap into the dark and come down thirty years later, I realize it is as Tim trying to save Timmy’s life with a story.”

Mom had just started unloading groceries when she got the call. There had been a problem with the heater in the lower wing at Eliza’s school and it caught fire to the Christmas trees that a few kindergarten classes had yet to take down. The fire truck and ambulance had just arrived, she could hear the sirens through the handset. Eliza and six others were being cared for. Mom dropped the telephone and ran for the door with her keys. I didn’t know what was going on, Mom told me later that my fever must have spiked because she was having a hard time knowing when I was awake.

I know better. Or maybe my body does. In a weird way, I think part of me knew there was something horribly amiss in the life of my baby sister. I woke up to a kitchen of half-emptied paper bags and a front door wide open.

If I could’ve, I would’ve been there with her. She’d tell me to throw snow on the fire, the elements would fight and there would be a winner. She would’ve joked that my fever would’ve intimidated the fire so much that it would’ve doused itself. To be extinguished forever and ever like her so beloved dandelions . . .

But thinking cannot help the change, so I’ll drift along when she cannot

Emily rolled over in her bed, the low-grade fever she was beginning to develop kept her under the thick quilt she and Eliza had shared since they were born.

Make sure you take a scarf. Don’t forget to button your jacket all the way! And grab a pair of gloves, the waterproof ones. Your wool ones will be soaked from the snow, it looks wet out there, Emily advised.

I wish I could stay home with you, she pouted. We could play in the snow all day!

I’m sick, Emily said.

No, you’re not. You just have a fever, her little sister teased. The snow would fix your fever and you’d be just fine!

Emily chuckled, Get your boots on before Mom has to drive you and then you can’t play in the snow.

Oops, not true. I burnt my tongue on a scalding cup of hot chocolate and it’s remains stick to my throat in the gooey smacking feel as I swallow. It’s a yum/yuck situation. There’s a small drip on my favorite thick scarf actually, I smell the salt from the caramel. Eliza and I used to swirl extra cream in our steaming mugs to watch the richness weaken into something lighter, a muddy shade of warm fires in the kitchen and Emily carrying us to bed when we fell asleep in their dad’s worn armchair.

But in the present, this day remained the same as any other. Bells rang for class changes and the same boys made their way around in one-shouldered backpack gangs. Class went on and the world turned on and on infinitum.

At 11:00 I went out to my car to get money for lunch and a fresh bottle of water. I never reuse a water bottle, I’m not sure I want to know what comes out of our school water fountains. It took longer than usual for me to sneak from the hallways of our cloistered school to the outside world. Here it is. This moment is where reality took a coffee break. It wasn’t real, it isn’t real.

Today, three students of Wisteria Heights High School infiltrated a vulnerable school and shot thirteen of their classmates and two teachers. Four students died within the walls of their high school, another died two hours and thirty-seven minutes later. The aftermath involved a suicide and two arrests, four prayer circles and the next three days of classes canceled. How can you help that?

What is there to say about a massacre of your friends? I don’t really see how anything could be written to salvage some shred of humanity from the waste. How do you even speak of something like this to people who saw it, heard it, ran for their lives? How the rusty smell of blood will unfortunately pull me back to this morning and helping Patrick McEllis stop the bleeding from his arm.