I Went To Columbine And Knew The Shooters. Here's What I Struggle With 25 Years Later.

It has been 25 years since the Columbine High School shooting, and I am not okay. None of us are.

I feel anguish for all the people who will become mass shooting victims over the next 25 years, for the communities who have yet to endure the tension and grief of trauma anniversaries. As a mass shooting survivor, this quarter-century reminder brings me back to April 20, 1999, and all of the ways we failed and continue to fail the children of this country in the aftermath of that day.

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“Get down!”

The yell came from somewhere behind me. I was in the school’s crowded cafeteria, standing in line at the food counter with a friend. A boy ran through the room, shouting, while hundreds of my classmates sunk to the tile floor underneath lunch tables. In unspoken agreement, my friend and I crouched down too.

I wondered what was going on. I didn’t know what had made that boy run and shout, but I assumed it was a senior prank. It was spring — only a few weeks until graduation and the end of the school year.

It never occurred to me that it was a school shooting.

I was a student at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado. As I knelt on the floor of the cafeteria, I had no idea two boys were killing and injuring our peers right outside the school. I only knew that I had English after lunch. I knew I had an essay due. I knew our other friends were at the table where I’d tossed my backpack a few minutes before.

I didn’t know I wouldn’t be going back to class that day, that we wouldn’t be returning to Columbine until the next school year. I didn’t know it would be months before I saw my backpack again. I didn’t know who would be killed or who would be injured or paralyzed. I didn’t know how my life, my friends’ lives and schools