I’ve been putting this off, because I don’t know what to say to you, but I know I need to say something. How could I not?

It’s been about 4 years now, but I still remember you. I remember the pain behind every “I’m sorry this happened to you.” I remember how it felt to sit in the dark. My mind was blank from every thought. I could only hear my heart; anyone who would have felt my pulse in that moment would have thought that I needed to go to the emergency room. I remember being certain that I wasn’t going to be safe and that he was coming for me next. You did that to me.

I don’t know what to say to you to be honest. I keep going through phases where I forget about the pain that you put me through, but when someone asks me about it or I see a small reminder, I remember how you made me walk through hell with my heart on my sleeve. Whether I got burned every day or not was a mystery to me, and I highly doubt that you didn’t enjoy doing that to me. The worst part about feeling like you’re walking through hell after something like this is that no one understands exactly how you feel. Sure, people might say that they know how it feels, and that makes it worse. I’m fairly certain that people would be kinder if they knew how it felt to walk through hell.

Until that day, I had never walked through a building, wondering if I was ever going to be safe and wondering if something else would put me in danger. Look what you’ve done to me. Now, I get nervous every time I sit down in a classroom. I don’t even go back to the site of your destruction, yet I still feel as though I’m in danger. Look what you’ve done to me.

The worst part about you is how you used your power to make an enemy out of each other. Though we were supposed to stand together in a time of tragedy, we would only fight fire with fire. Why? We wanted our answers, but at the same time, we all wanted to be right. The sad truth is that we will never get every answer that we want, and we will continue to fight each other in hopes of coming close. How could you do that to such a strong community in a matter of seconds? You’ve destroyed so much, and you will never feel any remorse, because you are just a memory; the most dreaded of memories.

Though you were a part of my past, I will never forget you. I want you to be a stranger, and I don’t think you’ll ever be.