Behind Broken Glass Walls

Prologue

Sometimes events are witnessed on the television or in the newspaper, self-described tragedies and traumas that are meant to make people cringe and be aware of our surroundings but that most of them have never experienced firsthand. In this way they are all stuck behind a glass wall that protects us from the horrors of the world so that they can't be touched on a personal level. When everyone is behind this glass wall they are able to just shut off the television or put down the newspaper and leave all of the tragedies and traumas behind so that they won't affect them as they go about our daily lives.

Oceana used to feel this way. She felt as though she were encased in a protective glass box, but as she sat in front of her television on that fateful day, watching that dreadful film footage play before her she knew that she wasn't just a bystander anymore. Oceana could see herself inside of that box as the glass began to shatter and crumble around her in large, sharp shards. This time she wasn't a mother half way across the country brewing up ideas on how to better protect her child from the newest monstrosity she had just had the pleasure of viewing.

As she watched the security camera footage from the high school that her daughter attended and followed the shadowy figure creeping across the school's gym as though she were involved in a game of hide and seek, she knew that she recognized the awkward gait of that figure. Oceana could see her shuffling with her shoulders sagging as though she were loaded with a weight of insecurities and sadness just waiting to take her over. She could pick that figure out from any crowd and in any situation.

That figure was Oceana's daughter.

But as the figure stopped and turned around, revealing a smoking shot gun in her hands as a fellow student of hers lay before her with blood spilling from their flesh, Oceana tried to search her face for any glimpse of her daughter that she might recognize. The girl stared at the camera as though she had known that it had been there the entire time and had shot her next victim in view of it in order to prove something to the viewer. Her angry eyes pierced Oceana's skin as she looked into her and they were not reminiscent of the girl she had just spoken to that morning when she had asked to stay home from school because she hadn't felt good. Letting her stay home made Oceana a part of what her daughter had done, and she couldn't claw that sickening feeling out of her skin. The guilt sank too deep.

The dropping in Ocean's chest descended to her stomach when she began to realize that as she watched the footage, all of the families of the lives her daughter had taken would be watching as well and they would not be seeing what she saw when she looked at her daughter. They would not see her as the glowing, passionate girl that Oceana had known, but as the killer that had taken away their children and changed their lives forever. When she thought about this her love for Drachea ached throughout her body as she realized that they would penalize her for loving her daughter when her daughter had cast so much evil over them.

But what they wouldn't know was that loving her daughter in that instance felt like the worst crime that Oceana could have committed when so many lives had been lost and so much passion was now required for them because of what her daughter had done. She knew from that moment on as she watched her daughter transform into something dark right in front of her that she should have felt some form of hate towards her. But instead, Oceana felt the same love for her that she always had and that feeling plagued her as she realized that her love for her daughter wouldn't change what she had done and it wouldn't justify her existence in the lives of the victims she had taken. This feeling haunted Oceana as I realized that no one else in this tragedy would be feeling what she was feeling because there had only been one shooter and that shooter had been her daughter. In this way Drachea had sentenced Oceana to a life of isolation because of how this tragedy would separate her from the others parents and the rest of the world. It felt as though Drachea had taken a gun to Oceana's chest without a second thought of what the repercussions would be and who would have to pay for them.

Drachea hadn't thought about Oceana at all when she had been planning this crime, and that alone hurt Oceana most of all.