Nowadays we all live in a horror story, a story of losing loved ones to themselves, afraid that they will never meet the expectations that are laid out for them. We all have the lingering fear that we will be the next victim of this tragedy, but you never know how fear filled it is until you are that victim. The chill in your spine, the fear struck stance you stand in, the tears that stream down.

This is why I got a semi colon tattoo, I was in that situation. I was here in Gunnison on a tour of the school I now call home when all the sudden my mom gets a call from the school that my brother was supposedly at. She was told that that morning my brother tried to commit suicide. She began crying and she couldn’t form words, so my dad took the phone and began talking to my counselor. Wendy explained to my dad that my brother was just taken off of the school grounds and was making his way to the hospital in a police car. My parents and I were just about to get a tour of Hurst hall, but as hard as we tried, we couldn’t focus entirely on the tour. Very shortly after the tour ended we made it back to the car and took the four hour drive back to Highlands Ranch. We parked in the parking lot of the Children’s hospital and walked inside. I still had not managed to say a word since we received the news, no words could form and my thoughts had taken over.

That was a year ago, and since I was a junior in high school I knew that I was going to get a tattoo. I came to college and it hit me, I wanted a semi colon tattoo, a tattoo that tells a story with just a simple punctuation mark. The story goes that the semi colon tattoo represents those who wanted to end their life but survived it, like how someone uses a semi colon to continue a sentence instead of ending it. My brother is very close to my heart and almost losing him was a very hard time in my life, but it changed me for the better. Life is not something to be taken for granted, it is to be lived to the fullest for as long as possible. I wanted to be reminded of that, so I now have a little reminder on my wrist. A reminder to keep living life to the fullest before it is too late.