Iwill not tell you my triggers, or the things I can no longer enjoy, because they are fluid and changing. Sometimes I look up at a sky with no clouds and all I can think of is how that was what the sky looked like on the day of the shooting, but sometimes I just think, I wish there were clouds because it’s so, so, so hot.

The strangest part of being a survivor was how badly strangers wanted to touch me, like I was a living relic. They’d shake my hand, or hug me, or lean on me to cry. They also wanted to tell me about the tragedies that touched them. So many voices saying how their loved ones had been gruesomely shot and killed. I’m an empathetic person, and I had no idea how to guard myself, how to turn away and toward myself. So I listened and I hugged these strangers back. Only months earlier, none of these people knew who I was. I was just a high-school kid in Parkland.


Before the shooting — February 14, 2018, perpetrated by a 19-year-old white supremacist at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School — my plan was to get the fuck out of Florida, the farther the better. Now, I write this from my pink childhood bedroom, having moved back home after graduating from college last year. I spend my days trying to get my future on the rails, finding new music, making zines, sewing, smoking weed, cooking, cleaning, figuring out what I want to do for work. I’m trying to be a good roommate to my parents. We watch movies together every night, making up for lost time.

It’s been almost five years since my classmates and I marched for the first time, and it’s hard not to feel like things are pretty much the same. Gun violence happens every day in this country. In November, the trial that was supposed to bring closure to our community brought only disappointment after the shooter was spared the death penalty. I see my March for Our Lives compatriots at protests once or twice throughout the year. I’m still trying to figure out what type of activism I want to engage in, since I don’t want to be passive for the rest of my life but I cannot exist in the way that I used to. I don’t know how I’m alive after all that.

12 months

1,200 American kids killed by guns

1,200 stories about the lives they led, reported by teen journalists across the country

Fatal shootings of children have been on the rise, government data show. But as the deaths mount, the toll is bigger than what numbers can capture.

See their names.