It arrives in a plain white envelope, just like any other bill come due, and Marcus Weaver grabs it from his mailbox with dread.

For 2½ years, he’s tried to find the right way to be ready for what’s in this envelope. He tried talking about his nightmares in public, then grieving them in private. He tried toughing out the pain in his shoulder, then asking for help. He saw himself as a victim. Then he was a survivor. It’s a process, he told himself.

But now, in mid-January, the envelope has arrived, and it can’t be a process anymore. Walking back to his apartment, he tears open the envelope and pulls out the contents.

It’s his subpoena. The district attorney’s office has summoned him to testify in the Aurora movie theater shooting trial.

And, for the first time, Marcus Weaver knows that it won’t be long until he has to confront the man who nearly killed him.

______

There are 70 of them who received subpoenas, 70 survivors of the Century Aurora 16 movie theater shooting who must go to court in the coming months to testify about their injuries so a jury can weigh whether they were victims of attempted murder.

In the 2½ years since the attack, each one of the 70 has tried a different way of exorcising trauma. Some have turned toward activism, and some have found solace in faith or art or family.

Marcus’ way is talking.

In late January, he stands at the front of a classroom writing his name on a white board in foot-tall letters.

______

Two dozen pubescent faces squint up at him.

“Can I have everybody stand up, and I will ask you a question?” he says.

The kids rise sluggishly.

“If this is true, you should sit down. Have you ever gotten into an argument or fight with your parents?”

They all sit.

“Exactly!”

Giggles.

It’s the opening line that he will give seven times to classes at Highlands Ranch’s Cresthill Middle School, three days after the start of jury selection in the theater shooting case.

He’s been giving these speeches in schools, for a group called Friends First, since even before the shooting. The goal is to provide kids with positive role models, which Marcus does by telling the kids about his own turbulent childhood and how he overcame those struggles. In the years before the shooting, the talk’s climax was his arrest after a police chase in 2007 and the nearly one year he spent in jail and prison, during which time he found religion and turned his life around.

“But then,” he now tells the kids, “the biggest obstacle of my life happened.”

As Marcus starts into the story of going to a movie with his friend Rebecca Wingo and seeing a smoke bomb fly across the theater, one kid in the classroom whispers to himself, “Oh, no.”

______

The first time he told the whole story in public was to a church group, three months after the shooting. He had given interviews the morning of the shooting — when his shotgunned right arm was still in a sling and he didn’t even know yet that Rebecca had been killed and he told reporters that of course he would forgive the shooter because that’s what his faith asks of him — but that was just a blur. This was different. This was cathartic.

He began accepting every offer that came his way to speak. He spoke at prisons to death row inmates and at schools and churches and on television news shows. He told people to appreciate life, to embrace forgiveness. At the support-group meetings that survivors of the theater shooting and relatives of the victims put together, Marcus was a cheerleader for recovery.

This is my mission, he thought. This is why I’m still alive.

“I felt empowered by going out and speaking,” he says. “But at home it was hard.”

At home, he neglected therapy and sank deep into the couch. His arm went numb 10 times a day, but he wouldn’t go to the doctor because how could he when so many other survivors were hurt worse? He hid much of his pain from his wife, Megan.

Finally, at Megan’s urging, he tried to make changes. He went back to seeing a therapist and saw a doctor about his arm. He took the dogs for walks and ate better and lost 50 pounds.

But then the subpoena arrived, and everything fell back apart.

To cope with the new stress, he took a week off work and went by himself to a movie — “American Sniper,” a film about a combat veteran suffering from post- traumatic stress disorder who pushes away those who try to help. And then he came home to Megan and sat her down and looked her in the eyes.

“How do you really see me?” he asked. “Tell me the truth.”

She told him about his sometimes indecipherable dark moods, about his sudden bursts of frustration, about days when he wouldn’t budge from the couch and nights when he felt so distant. She told him about how he would talk about the theater all the time, to anyone, even if he wasn’t asked about it.

Marcus listened quietly.

“Megan,” he finally said. “I think there’s something wrong.”

______

They sit together in the dining nook of their apartment, and the setting sun shoots a ray of light into the room.

“Things are getting better,” Marcus says.

“It’s a process, though,” Megan says.

It’s early February, only a few weeks after their talk, but finally Marcus feels that the person he is inside is catching up to what he’d tried to show on the outside.

He’s decided to cut back on his burden and limit his speeches — though, holding a 2-inch-thick binder of thank-you letters he’s received from school kids, he says he won’t stop speaking for Friends First. He’s continued going to counseling. He can now lift his arm over his head.

More importantly, he and Megan are talking, honestly and about everything.

“Now when we come home and see each other, what’s the first thing we do?” he asks her playfully.

She looks perplexed.

“Kisses?” she says.

“And then we talk about our days,” he says.

He still looks toward the trial with worry. All 70 do. At the most recent support group meeting, the subpoenas were the biggest topic of conversation — about how they arrived right in the middle of the healing process, about how no one felt ready.

“A lot of people still hurt,” Marcus says.

He wonders about the trial. What will it be like to face the shooter? Is this a step forward toward closure? Or is that just a mirage?

But then he thinks about his new job, as the director of client services and programs at a Denver organization called New Genesis that works to help the homeless, and he thinks about Megan, who is pregnant with their first child.

In the apartment, the sun slides below the mountaintops, and he and Megan get ready to celebrate a friend’s birthday. He smiles and repeats something he told the middle school kids a few weeks earlier. Something he’s told himself hundreds of times since the shooting.

“Forgiveness is not about the other person,” he says. “It’s about you.”

John Ingold: 303-954-1068, jingold@denverpost.com or twitter.com/johningold