Aurora

I haven't posted this because frankly I didn't know where to start.

You may have heard, my sweet little town, the town without even a downtown, had a shooting.

If you hadn't heard then, well, we did. On July 20th a man, James Holmes, went to a midnight showing of the new Batman movie and opened fire. He killed 12 people and injured many more.

Friday morning I went to work early. I was pulling into the parking lot at 15 minutes to 6am when I started to get text messages from friends on the East Coast. I didn't understand at first why they were asking me about going to the movies and if I was alright.

I'm 33 but live life at the breakneck speed of 60. Of course I didn't go to a midnight showing of a movie. Are you out of your mind? Some of us have jobs to do. At 6am on a Friday.

But. I've been to that theater. I have taken my children to movies there. Kylie asked if they were hiring earlier in the summer.

My town is small. Most people in Denver make fun of it because we are essentially just a suburb. They talk about it like it's full of gangsters and drug dealers. Lots of people call it Saudi Aurora. (I have no idea why, by the way. It's not as if we are an oil rich city in the desert.)

But Friday morning the people of Aurora and the people of Colorado felt the sting of violence. For all the joking we don't have a high crime rate. We are middle class, working folks. Almost everyone I know works in other cities within Colorado but we live in Aurora. We shop here. We play here. We go to movies here. We live here.

Here it is now, a few weeks later, and for most of the country Aurora is forgotten. A sad situation in a little town in Colorado.

But for us here, we are still healing. And reeling.