It feels like some kind of sick cosmic punishment for being the girl who refuses to be afraid of walking home at night, the girl who travels alone and will have none of your questions about whether or not she should. It feels as though some wretched higher power saw the defiance on my face and saw fit to put a heel to it.
Or, more accurately, a rock.
I’m not telling you this so that you can tell me it’s not my fault. I’m telling you how it feels.
I’m telling you how it feels because that is the best thing I can do to cope. I’m telling you how how it feels because my first inclination is to say nothing. It is in my nature to avoid uncomfortable conversations and the possibility that my feelings will be shunned as attention-seeking. But I’ve also learned how toxic it is to let that shit fester.
Silence seems like a kind of emptiness until you’ve watched the way it can grow and multiply and fill all the space in your life. I want to decide how to fill the space in my life.
I want to know why this happened. I want a reason.
I’ve got this loop going in my head of the minutes between when I first saw him in the cul-de-sac to the moment he changed his mind and ran away.
I keep wondering if he was trying to rob me or rape me. Or if he just wanted to know what it would feel like to smash someone’s head with a rock. What it was that made him decide I was the person to rob/rape/smash. As if an answer to that would make it all make sense.
I keep scrolling through the map of my run. Here is where I first saw him, right after I decided to turn around and head back into the park because it was raining and I wanted to protect my stupid new phone. Here is where I was running. The very first time I ran through there I tripped because the path is narrow and covered in twigs and rocks. Here is where he was probably following me all along, but I couldn’t hear because I had my headphones in, oblivious. Here is where I was attacked. Here is where I fell to the ground.
Recorded for posterity. Timestamped and geotagged.
Not documented: Screaming. Kicking. His running away.
It’s hard for me to even sort out what happened in that altercation. The map isn’t particularly clear either, because it works on averages. There’s a bit of guesswork in pinpointing where I stopped. I can see where I ran away, racing to get out of the trees and back to the bike path. I can see where I saw the two kind strangers who walked me out of the park. I can see the point where my pace slowed to a walk as they convinced me to call the cops.
I love that park. It’s a lovely park with high trees and a picturesque bridge crossing over the creek. It’s usually filled with friendly, smiling dog walkers in the mornings. They smile and nod as I pass. When I first started running there, seeing other people stressed me out and made me self-conscious about my weight and being slow and all the other dumb shit I’m always self-conscious about. But then I saw the same faces again and again and they become comfortable and familiar. The smile-and-nod reminds me of moving to Missouri. It reminds me of my parents. The park itself often reminds me of running through the trees during a surprise rainstorm on spring break in grad school.
And I don’t know if I can get up and go back there on Monday morning.
I hate that. I truly fucking hate that.
I am afraid to be alone and I hate that too. Being helpless and dependent is the stuff my nightmares are made of. Yesterday I cried most during the long periods I spent waiting in the hospital. I did not like having to answer questions or talk, in general, but it was so much worse when I was by myself.
I still feel that way — like I don’t want to talk but I also don’t want to be alone.
Last night I was kept awake by fits of tears and panic. Finally I turned on the lights and watched Chitty Chitty Bang Bang until my eyes wouldn’t stay open. And when I woke up a little later to put my laptop away and turn off the lights, I saw his stupid fucking face one more time as I was falling back to sleep.
And even as I tell you all of this, I think about how much worse things could have been. I think about all the terrible things that have happened to people that I love. I think about how lucky I am that it ended as quickly as it did. How fucking lucky.
I am trying so hard to speak to myself the way I would speak to my friends. I keep trying to pretend that someone else is telling me this story so that I can imagine what I would tell them. That this is terrible. That I am allowed to feel terrible. That suffering is not a contest and there is no point in making comparisons like that. That I am allowed to be angry and sad and whatever else. That it’s OK to make jokes about it one minute and cry again the next.
But I can’t shake the feeling that this just feels so fucking typical. Of course this happened to me, who makes such irresponsible decisions, who comes from a family plagued by all the problems that accompany never learning to be appropriately afraid of everything that’s out there.
I can already hear sighing on the other end. I can hear that muttered, “Here we go again.”
It wouldn’t bother me quite so much if I weren’t also thinking that maybe this time it worked. That maybe this scared me enough.
And even as I want to thank the kindly strangers and the even kinder paramedics or my amazing roommate, it also feels like a lie to pretend that all of this provides some sort of balance to the equation.
When I finally made it home and got a chance to shower off the sweat and dirt and blood, I could feel my world getting a little smaller. I hate that most of all.