Mama and Pop went on a trip this week. Usually they save the trips for weekends or summer vacation with me, but they said they wanted to go alone and asked if I could heat up my own TV dinners and stay safe overnight by myself. I’m a senior in high school. Raised by them. I heat up my own TV dinners and stay safe overnight every day by myself. I didn’t say it that way to them, though. I just said yes.
So on Tuesday morning, they set their GPS for Newtown, Connecticut. That’s where the 2013 Sandy Hook massacre was. I bet you could scan Mama’s camera and I bet you’d find pictures of all the landmarks that were on TV. The firehouse. The neighbor’s house. The school’s parking lot. I bet you’d find a hundred damp, balled-up tissues on the floor of Pop’s Buick, too.
It’s like they’re mourning the loss of me and I’m still alive. It’s like they’re mourning the loss of something bigger than all of us and they take me with them to show me the hole. I’ve already been to Columbine, Virginia Tech, the site of that Amish school, and Red Lake, Minnesota. We even flew to Dunblane, Scotland, when I was ten.
I own the most morbid snow globe collection in the world.
For what it’s worth, I can’t lay one more cheap bouquet of flowers by a memorial. I can’t light one more candle. I can’t count out twenty fluffy teddy bears that will only wilt under the Connecticut winter snows.
For what it’s worth, I sobbed for three days after that guy shot up those kids in Newtown. I stopped using tissues because my nose got so raw. I didn’t shower. I didn’t talk. I didn’t breathe, hardly. Call me emotional or a drama queen and I don’t care. I’ll tell you again: I fucking sobbed.
Then I dissected a frog.
It didn’t make me feel any better, but it made me stop crying.