#uccstrong

Nobody prepares you for what it’s like after a mass shooting happens in your hometown.

Nobody prepares you for the constant looks of pity and sympathy you get from everybody that asks where you went to school.

Nobody prepares you for the inappropriate questions people can’t help but ask. “Did you know anyone?” “Were you there?”

The feeling of everyone texting you back saying they are safe except one.. hoping to god if there is one that her phone is just dead or she’s still sleeping.

Grieving with someone who just lost their baby sister on her first week of college.

Nobody prepares you for the constant state of anxiety you’ll live in when the reality is that it can happen again. Anytime. Anywhere..

Being too afraid to leave your house. Never having your back to the door. As if staring death in the face is somehow better than not seeing it coming.

Always looking around at your surroundings, paying extra attention to people wearing hoods, trench coats, large backpacks or their hands in their pockets. Taking extra precautions to listen to what’s happening outside your building. Was that a chair being pushed in? Did someone drop something? Is that a car door being slammed closed?

Having to remind yourself that fireworks are going to be lit on days A, B and C.

Realizing that the first place you ever called home is now a statistic and branded “that small town where the shooting happened,” and having it be in the same statements regarding politics and funeral protests.

Having to see your friends trying to move on with their life with the emotional and physical effects of the massacre. Trying to create a new normal.

Understanding that you’ll never know the magnitude of pure terror that happened with those who weren’t so lucky to see their loved ones again.

Accepting the fact that you’ll never honestly know why it happened.

Replaying the scene of that morning as you pictured it in your head over and over

Wishing you could go back in time and brutally butcher the mother fucking beta male that thought his life was so bad that he took and ruined lives of complete strangers just because he thought the world owed him more than what he got, before taking his own life like a fucking coward. Gutting him like the pig he is

Replaying that scene in your head too (not so bad)