a new understanding...

When I woke up this past Monday morning, I opened my laptop and my Facebook page came up. The posts that I expected to be the usual statuses about mundane life occurrences turned out to be expressions of sorrow. Confused at first, I scrolled down the page, seeing only the words “RIP Shelby” next to all of my friends’ pictures. It hit me all at once. The night before a girl I knew from school had been involved in a car wreck that had killed her. My eyes immediately started watering, and the only word I could mutter past the tears that were rolling down my cheeks was, “What?” I said it about fifteen times before I fully grasped what had happened. I did not know Shelby well. She has been in a couple of my classes throughout the years, and I have had some conversations with her….

She was the first person to pass away in the class of 2012. I guess what hit me the hardest was the fact that she was my age, and now she is gone. How could someone my age have passed away in such a tragic way?

 I walked into my English class today and sat down like usual… Except it was not the way it has been so many times before. In the place of a pretty, smiling 16 year old girl, a bouquet of tiger lilies sat. As my classmates filed into the room, no one said anything. No one had to. As my teacher forced her condolences past her own tears, we all sat in a sorrow-filled silence. After she sat down, I do not know how long we all sat there staring at the floor, trying not to look at the desk where our peer once sat. Later on into the class period, my teacher handed out graded work. When she came to Shelby’s, she smiled. She read to us a couple of the funny comments that Shelby had left on her last vocabulary test, and we could not help but smile with pain in our eyes. It was hard. It was hard to realize that she would never walk through that door again. It was hard to realize that she would never again sit in her assigned desk, smiling as we stumbled through a class discussion. It was hard to realize that those comments on that test belonged to someone who could never leave their handwriting on another paper again.

Life is a vapor. I don’t think I fully understood those words in my last post. Now I do. It only took a second for that drunk driver to hit the car Shelby was in. Only in a small amount of time did the car flip several times. In a minute, a life was lost.

I don’t know why I typed this all out. I guess it is more for my own sake than for anyone reading this. All I know is that I am going to treasure every moment with each one of my friends and family as if it were my last, because in an instant it could all be lost. I don’t know what else to say, I’m still trying to sort through all of these thoughts swirling around in my head myself… life is a vapor. I get it now, I understand that truth…..and walking through that door again tomorrow…seeing that empty desk, it will be hard. But it will remind me what I live for and what I love for.