365 Cups of Coffee

Twenty-Four: Snickerdoodle Coffee

    On the six month anniversary of the shooting, my mom buys me a bag of snickerdoodle coffee in an attempt to distract me.  Except I don’t even realize what day it is until English honors, where we have to look up current events, and an article about the shooting is trending in the news.  Logan finds me another article to look at quickly, but it’s too late, I’ve already remembered.  I take a sip of my snickerdoodle coffee from my travel mug, and breathe in its familiar smell, trying to get my mind off of it.  But I can’t.

    What are Dylan and my friends back in Georgia doing now?  Are they going to remind them of the date, or has it been seared into their minds anyway?  I hope they won’t do any special mourning event.  I hope they save that sort of thing for a year after the shooting, so people have some distance from it.  I can’t stop questioning these things, so I email Dylan, asking him.  It’s probably not the right thing to do, but I have to know.

    Logan and I eat lunch in the library again.  I’ve never really told him everything that happened; everything he knows is from the conversation he overheard between Daniel and I, so I sit down and tell him the entire story.  I can feel myself start to lose it at the reminder that it’s already been six months, that it’s already late October, and that my life is spinning by so fast I can hardly control it.  It seems wrong to just forget about my past every single day, to block it out and pretend it doesn’t exist.  It’s a part of me, after all.  My blood is rooted deep in Georgia.

    For some reason, I feel like I can confess this all to Logan.  I think, after all, that he might be my best friend here, other than Daniel.  He listens, and he’s always up to hang out, and he always knows what to say.

    “I didn’t want to tell anyone in the beginning,” I say, wrapping up my account of what happened.  “I mean, you don’t just go up to someone and introduce yourself as a murderer . . . Or a hero.  Whatever your mind decides to label yourself as.  You just introduce yourself as Aspen.  But I went beyond that.  I concealed it.  I wouldn’t tell anyone why I’d moved – I mean you know that.  And now, I think that’s wrong.”

    Logan looks at me sincerely, face creased in thought.  “I don’t know if what you did was wrong, at the time you did it,” he says.  “You had to move on, forget about it for a while.  And now, now that you can live with it, now you have to be honest with yourself and others.  Acknowledge that it’s a part of your life, but that it’s not your life.”

    I nod, and he pulls me into a hug.  Now that I’ve told him everything, I feel like I’ve purged, yet again.  It feels good to tell my story, instead of someone else’s, for once.  Maybe that’s what I have to learn to do.  I have to learn to not hide behind the stories of others, to share my own just as openly. 

    I’m still feeling pretty okay once the bell rings after lunch, maybe even better than I did last night.  But it’s in the hallway, passing the cafeteria on my way to class, that a loud noise like a gunshot rings throughout the hallway.  I immediately freeze in my tracks before realizing it doesn’t even sound close to the sound of a gunshot.  Kids are coming out of the cafeteria saying things like “dumbass freshmen.”  So someone probably knocked over one of the large benches.  I breathe, but something still feels off in my brain.

    The voices around me turn to screams, and, on instinct, I walk briskly out of the hallway, racing out into the open hallway and then to the safety of outside.  But when no one follows me, I realize I had another flashback, the first one I’ve had in over a month.  My heart is beating, and I’m sweating like a pig, but I manage to fumble for the cell phone I now have and type in Daniel’s number.  He doesn’t pick up right away, and I start to panic, so I call him three more times, hoping he’ll realize it’s urgent.  I feel so weak all of a sudden, so needy, and it’s not a state I want to be in, but I know he’ll understand.