It was twelve minutes before I had to leave the house for pom.

Twelve minutes seems like forever if you’re a 15-year-old sitting in class, waiting for the bell to ring on a Friday afternoon. Twelve minutes is how long it takes to bake a potato. Twelve minutes after a girl’s nails are painted, they’re already ruined.

Twelve minutes is all it took for the police to find my best friend dead.

Twelve minutes.

I was what rappers these days call “shell shocked”. I was shaking and the sound of gun shots echoed through every centimeter of my mind. All up in a cloud, I played out the blurry scene as if I was there myself. I blinked and blinked harder until my eyes morphed into wells and over flowed with liquid that I couldn’t contain. Everything was foggy, and I could no longer read what was displayed on the screen of my blue iPhone.

I had just seen my best friend’s face planted in the middle of a news article labeled “Deadly Shooting in Saginaw”.
Ever since I learned what a gun was, I was told on a daily basis that you never point a gun at anything unless you intend to pull the trigger and shoot. Growing up, I watched NCIS every Thursday and saw my grandpa pull bullets out of enough deer to know that guns have the ability to create an eerie silence and end lives forever for both the victim and their family. The images of the crime scenes and the dead deer from my past shook me as I returned to the current situation.

I wallowed within my arms wrapped tightly around my fragile body. The ticking of the clock, sitting a few feet away, reminded me of the article. I remembered reading something about twelve minutes; something had happened. Muddling through the words again, I learned that he had texted his fiancé just twelve minutes before they found him lifeless in his uncle’s truck.

I looked over to my dresser which proudly held a frame with my uncle and me smiling like clowns. I rushed over to the drawers and slammed the glass to the ground leaving it in pieces on my filthy floor. I felt guilty. The picture reflecting how happy I was with my uncle and now my friend will never be able to return his uncle’s truck back to him. He was brutally killed within it.

I didn’t know what to do because I was the only human in my home. I was all alone, just like all of us who knew him.

I don’t know who took his life, and I’m not completely sure I ever will. This monster made the choice to point the gun at something and pull the trigger. I don’t know everything about life, and I don’t know the purpose for their choice, all I know is that part of my heart was on the other side of the barrel.

I not only lose my friend, I lost a piece of me. My 21-year-old friend, who had just named his baby, found dead in a neighborhood he called home.

All I could do was pick up my pom bag and slam the door. My entire body shook as if the echoing that screamed from the door frame was an angel letting me know he made it to the other side.

You never know what the last sound you ever hear will be.

Twelve minutes was all it took for my heart to break.