I was smiling.

I remember smiling…giggling to myself. I had such a good day…unusual for someone who hated high school. I think back now and it was one of the happiest days of my senior year.

I think I was happy because prom was on the way. Maybe it was because I was on my way to Clemson in the fall.

The sun was shining and graduation was just a few weeks away. My life seemed so right.

I left school at 3:00 that afternoon, giddy about something petty…probably prom night shenanigans or something funny my A.P. Literature teacher said earlier that morning. I walked out to my black Camaro, and remember feeling the warmth of that spring sunshine. Life was good that day.  Really good.  I remember the new car smell as I dropped my backpack into the passenger seat. My drive home was pretty quick, the usual ten minute excursion through the back country roads leading me to Enoree. I’m sure I was listening to R.E.M.’s,  New Adventures in Hi-Fi.

I pulled into our driveway. I was the first one home. I don’t even think Big Daddy was home yet. Grant rode with a friend. I went straight to my room and lounged on the bed…writing in my diary about graduation, the perfect weather, how lucky I was to have my Camaro, and the anxiety surrounding my upcoming college experience at Clemson. I flipped on my little television to have some background noise. It was 3:30 p.m. in Enoree, South Carolina.

Across the miles it was 1:30 p.m. in Columbine, Colorado. I stared at the screen of my TV, seeing blood stained sidewalks, tears, horror…chaos.

I sat up attentively and witnessed the aftermath of the deadliest mass murder committed on an American high school campus. Things started to spin, I remember my own tears. Just thirty minutes before I turned on that TV, my life was perfect. A teen-age dream. The perfect car, hair, clothes, body, grades, future, boyfriend…you name it. I had it all.

I was eighteen.

But wait…some of those kids in Columbine were eighteen.

“They hid under the tables?” They were shot. They were hurt. They DIED.

They were eighteen. They had the perfect car, the clothes, the body, the boyfriend, the grades…the future.

They had.

I cried. I cried so long and so hard, I began to sob. I shuddered with grief for kids I didn’t even know. I still cry sometimes when I think about the fear…the deepest fear a human can know…the fear for their own life. They should be thirty today…married…enjoying their kids, or careers.

That one, normal Tuesday afternoon changed my life. It was as if someone pressed the fast-forward button on my entire existence. That day I grew up. Instead of worrying what I would wear to high school the next day, I worried if some of my classmates had some of the same feelings as Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris.  I worried about the future…everyone’s future. Everything that used to matter seemed to fall away, and the teen-age dream turned into a nightmare.

I don’t know why this memory is plaguing me today. Maybe it’s all the gun talk or too much American Horror Story. Today, I go about my normal life with a grown-up list of worries and stress. Still, I sometimes stop and think of a blonde, skinny eighteen year old with the world at her feet, and I think of those I considered my own classmates that day in Colorado…may they live on.