Just breathe {and Just Write}

I hear the ringtone, Just Breathe, and it's coming closer, up the stairs. It stops just before she hands it to me. "Daddy called," she announces.

I put down the eyeliner, the brown pencil I didn't begin writing with until two months ago after the make-up artist at the wedding told me I was crazy to never wear eyeliner. I didn't want to be crazy, so I bought my first eyeliner at the ripe old age of 37. And now I'm still crazy, but with fancier makeup.

I dial him back as I walk downstairs. "Did you say you were going grocery shopping?" he asks.

I grab my coat. "Yeah, we're leaving now. Why?"

"There's been a shooting at the high school in Chardon, and it sounds like a bunch of areas are blocked off, including that shopping center."

Shocked, I pepper him with questions he doesn't have answers for, hang up and head for the computer. It's been barely more than a half hour since the shooting, and even within the major channels, rumors fly. Two shooters, no make that one. Not yet apprehended, wait--no, now he's in custody. Four students wounded. No make that five. 

I want to cry. I want to race into my son's second grade class and hug him until my arms fall off. I want to erase it, rewind, turn it into a drill, a false alarm, anything but the tragedy it's shaping up to be.

Of course I can't find a way to do any of these things, not even to cry.  I know better than to try to make sense of this sort of thing. And I know how little good it does to add my lifted fist to the thousands already shaking at the sky. So what's left, then, except to pull the ones I love closer, to write my way back from anger to gratitude, to pray my way back from fear to faith, to breathe.