My interest in Columbine pretty much started rather innocently.  My niece informed me she was part of a kind of club called “Rachel’s Challenge”. Y’all might be familiar with that, huh? 😉   We watched “The Untold Story of Rachel Scott” which is the tale of Rachel’s story told from her father’s perspective obviously from a very Christian viewpoint.  Afterwards, my sister referred to ‘those evil boys’ to my niece in her lecture and how spiritually uplifting the documentary was and how spiritually prophetic Rachel must have been. For reasons unknown, I instantaneously knee-jerked an almost, oddly protective stance and said “well, how do we know what the full picture is from their side of the fence, those boys?” ‘Evil’ seemed to be a rather convenient word and at some points in the documentary I nearly gagged at how biasedly evangelistic skewed the story was told.  And from there, I began to do some researching on my own time starting out with the usual one-stop-shop acolumbine website as a first resource. The first thing I did when I got there?  Went right to ‘The Shooters’ pages, and then I hit their journals (naturally!)  I skimmed through Eric’s journal at first and then immediately got sucked into a vortex when I first glimpsed Dylan’s journal.  The last thing I expected to find in a school shooters journal was the mantra-like theme of giant, gloppy hearts and laments and longings for love, happiness and eternal freedom. (Ironically, to me, Dyl always seemed naturally like a free spirit hippy to the core that was in the wrong place at the wrong time. :))   I was also just stunned and captivated by the uniqueness of his journal, the poetic melancholy and longing for something he felt he could never have.  Dylan’s just reads like an old soul.  His intellectual ponderings and semi-formed personal philosophies are like a provocative, enigmatic key into my heart and spirit.  Whenever I read ‘Existences’ for any sort of reference or for no reason in particular at all except to ruminate, I find myself preferring to read from his own scrawling handwriting which changes like a barometer of his mood on any given day.  Each time I go visit Dyl and  tread where that “supernatural force blocks common people from entering”, I get lost within little passages and end up going further than I’d intended.  Time flies by, literally. 😉   I almost always can discover something new that I hadn’t noticed before.  Something that makes me sigh in awe or lament empathically (oh, those ‘Dyl feels’ that speak to so many of us) or even chuckle over the goofy, self-effacing bits of his journal and notebook.   The ‘ponderer’ I become in the God of Sadness’ domain.  

After my ‘introduction’ of sorts to all things Columbine, I sort of drifted away with the usual life stuff going on –  only to find myself redirected back into It, like an arrow pointing right past the Aurora shootings that had just occurred in 2012.   This time, the more I began to wander down the rabbit hole that is/was Columbine, the more it became clear to me that this was an important event of spiritual significance that went waay beyond the one dimension ‘good’ versus ‘evil’ propaganda spin that evangelical religion conveniently like to brand it with.  Like the majority, my sister had bought the simple explanation that the boys could be explained away as simply ‘evil’, ‘crazy’ or flat out ‘psychopaths’ that killed dear, sweet Rachel for her religious beliefs.  But people forget..eradicate the reality that they were human people too  with a story, a past, all their own. They chose to revolt on their own school. Why? Shouldn’t we listen and acknowledge their reasoning? The attention they called to why they’d work so hard to erase their school off the map.  It’s much more complex than deevolving into killing simply because ‘they were evil’.  Columbine evokes human struggle, it rallies to those that feel separate and the illusions of not feeling connected, yet the truth of that matter is, that we all still are, it’s just that some suffer in the exclusivity of society and so we just get broken and lost along the way.  These boys lost the way as many of us do and so, we who choose to really look deeply at Columbine,  see them in ourselves looking back. I realized that what called to me about this event reflected my own life’s journey and the unresolved past issues and baggage within my life that was forgotten yet never fully healed. The boys – one of anger and one of sadness – are a relatable, deep, psychological touchstone for people that find a kind of mirroring with themselves and the struggles in their present or past life.  The injured, damaged ones that have fully understand what it feels like to be bullied, ignored, ostracized, felt injustices or just out-of-sorts with the human world.  It became apparent to me as my studies progressed more that my focus of attention seemed to be honing in with laser sharp magnification on Dylan Klebold. I resisted my plunge into Columbine and this fascination with Dylan at first but then eventually decided to throw caution to the wind and follow my heart – to be open and receptive towards this gravitational pull to explore and discover Dylan fully as a teenage boy, essentially a good person, bright and full of promise, a lost human being – and stripped from the ‘Columbine Killer’ image. Essentially, I am him and he is me – as many of us here feel the same.  He could be anyone of us in that everlasting contrast struggle within us.  So when you ask me why Dylan, that will have to suffice for my reasoning because It resonates deeper than that; I feel it energetically more than I can express it into ineffective human words, I’m afraid!