I’ve been a lot of ages and I have always been afraid. 

This fear is constant but rarely urgent.

I think it’s been taught to me, I think I have been trained and prepared to be afraid, to act the right way while being afraid. 

I was born four months and one day after two boys went into the high school by my house with guns. 

I was five when I became sentient. The principal banging on the door, our backs pressed against the wall as she begs to be let in. The next month she will still be banging but this time she’ll be pretending to be the scary man and she won’t sound scared anymore but I still will be. 

Something about simulating the real thing, about how there would be someone banging the door.

I was eleven when my mom sat my brother and I down to show us a youtube video. The man in the video told me I didn’t have to be a ‘sitting duck’ and I could go against the instructions I had been given. “Don’t be a hero” my mom said. Then we watched another video about how the metal chairs in classrooms can break a window if used properly. 

Something about a broken leg being better than being shot in biology class. 

I was a month away from turning twelve when my mom woke me up to tell me about a theater, a man, and my cousin. I was sleeping on the pullout couch with my best friend at the time. My cousin was ok. Her friend wasn’t but then was. 

Something about a bullet exiting and entering.

It was five months after my twelfth birthday when my mom picked me up from school and I heard about a teacher hiding kids in cabinets in Connecticut. Whenever something like this happens, my mom will spend the rest of that day and following days reading constantly about it. 

Something about the man who did it, something about the gun he had and how many rounds were fired, something about how one of the victims was a good person and how sad it is. 

It was five months and a few days after my twelfth birthday when I asked my mom if we could stop talking about it. I didn’t want to hear anymore because it made the fear in my head tingle too much. 

I was fourteen and in High School when I had a mild panic attack laying on the stage of the dark auditorium. The announcement was made during the passing period. They do it at times it’s statistically more likely to happen. So I went into the nearest room, the theater room, the one with 2 small glass panels next to the door. Someone could shoot the glass and reach in and unlock it. So we were moved to the auditorium and instructed to lay on the stage.

Something about how it’s harder to shoot someone laying down. 

My cousin Katie was quiet her whole life but the real quiet started after the theater and the man in July 2012. I never heard her talk about it but every time I saw her, I felt like she was still experiencing it. 

She told my mom her life was saved because she had her car keys and phone in her pocket, she left her purse in the theater. 

She also told my mom about having to push people out of the way because they froze. 

As a child raised in Littleton, Colorado in the immediate aftermath of Columbine, I received all the training not to freeze. 

On the first day of school every year, teachers would talk about their homework policies, their absency policies, and the lockdown procedure. 

“Locks, Lights, Out of Sight.” 

Every year, someone would ask what to do if we were in the bathroom when it happened. 

Something about putting your feet up and staying where you are. Unless you think you could run to an exit. 

I still think this way. I’m still looking at the exits when I’m in a new place. The fear is still there, playing a high risk game hypotheticals. 

“What if it happened here? Will you run? Where would you hide?”

I was shocked when I graduated high school without being killed in the hallway of my high school, becoming addicted to something, or becoming a teen mom. 

Something about surviving the odds. 

Someday this will all end, the constant fear will be replaced with forever blue light. 

Before then, there will be more fear, ebbing and flowing. 

I will buy disposable plastic flossers and have to google who to vote for and be secretly afraid of a lot of things. 

Something comforting in knowing this is bigger than me, that I can mess up but not mess it up more than it already is. 

The end of the world. 

Growing up in 2008. 

Joking about the end of the mayan calendar. Calling my best friend at 5pm to say goodbye on December 31 just in case. 

Lots of ends of the world, small and big, real and fake. 

The apocalypse, not a religious one, not a zombie one. Just a poetic way to say everything I have already mentioned. 

A blue light everywhere, not an alien UFO. 

Something about light refracting, the sky being blue, the ocean being blue but clear in my hands. 

What will happen when the government announces it? 

TV shows interrupted, sirens blaring. 

Will people dance in the street? Will people hug strangers like it's Times Square and we have revolved the sun once more? 

Something about a final exaltation, a simultaneous release of energy, the most human version of the big bang. 

After the sirens begin, I will know what to do. Years of lockdown drills have prepared me. My back will no longer be against the walls of my elementary school, middle school, or high school. Nor will it be pressed against the stage of the auditorium.

Instead, I will have good posture for the first time of my life and I will call the people I love and tell them that I can’t wait to see them wherever we go after we die. These calls will be prompt as I’m guessing we have limited time. 

After that, I guess I will go to the nearest body of water. I have to emphasize that I don’t believe in religion but I do think a lot of the things they do make sense. I want to experience a baptism. I did once but I was just a body. 

Also baptisms usually are about beginning. This is about ending, about preparing my body for the next one. 

Something about taking a hot shower and waiting till I feel like I will pass out then turning the handle, making the water cold in one moment. Relief, cleanliness, maybe the closest I have felt to god. 

The water covering my ears and the world echoing back to me through the complex acoustic devices on both sides of my skull. 

The vibrations of the world, the water, the earth around me. 

I wonder if the fish knew this was coming? If they’ve known for a long time. If they have experienced this before. 

The lake by my house.

When I was in third grade, a boy in my class disappeared at recess. They yelled his name in every bathroom in the school before concluding he was gone or had been taken. He was on the playground then he wasn’t. The search went on past the time school ended. At some point, the evening news announced he had been found. He was in the lake. He was very alive, just hadn’t finished the homework that was due after recess. I’m not sure if this was what they said, but I always pictured him swimming through the cattails and doing a backfloat.

Now my mom and I walk by the lake. Not much has changed about it since I came here growing up. A new playground and the lake was drained a few years ago, but you wouldn’t know that by looking at it now. The playground is bordering on outdated and the lake is full and frozen over. 

There’s missing posters taped to the trees as a young man is missing in the area. His family is out in the lake wearing waders and they’re slinging whatever tools they figured could break ice into the thick sheets of it. Apparently the cops aren’t helping. It’s been a month since he walked away on New Years Day. 

Maybe he’ll float up soon as the ice thaws during a couple of unusually warm February days. 

I sometimes practice searching my mind for my earliest memory. I usually have my eyes open because I do this mostly in public: in line at the DMV, waiting for a light to change, etc. I try to see if maybe today is the day I will remember my birth. It has yet to be that day. 

Usually I land on one of a few memories. Most of them are probably fabrications of the mind. I’m trying so hard to remember something that my mind finds a story I’ve been told about being young and I come up with the pictures for it. Nonetheless, I will take them as truth. 

The only one of these memories which I know is real is that of some mid winter day in 2005. Maybe early 2006. 

My uncle was missing, but that’s not what the memory is really about. I’m 6 with my ear pressed against the fence alongside my brother and a family friend. Family friend’s mother would die a couple years later, but right now we are listening to my mother. Our little ears find the gaps between the 2x4s and we listen intently as she is being interviewed by the news. 

He was 40 and paranoid schizophrenic. 

Then again, I do have one memory earlier than that: him, my Uncle Jim, cutting a tree down in our backyard. It’s an oversaturated blue sky day and I’m watching as the chainsaw whirs.

He was found dead in May by two methed out contractors for Walgreens. 

Water as a non religious, practical baptism. 

Something about starting fresh.

Brooklyn Cobb, 2022