Athens, Revised | annotated by Mark

Blurry photo of a woman walking through a large, rectangular opening in a structure into the bright sunlight with her long shadow trailing behind.

A month before I graduated from high school in 1996, I was learning to see my female body as more than just a vessel to resent and attempt to thin. My body was also a set of weapons that could protect. The heel of my hand could drive nasal bone into brain. Bunched fingers could eject eyeballs from sockets.

The self-defense course, called Model Mugging, was underwritten by an alumna of my school and offered to every senior girl. The male instructors—known as “padded assailants”—would don protective gear so that we students could practice hitting them without restraint, as if fighting for our lives, or to prevent being raped. Or both.

Who could argue with such a well-intentioned effort to help young women protect themselves? “Empowerment through self-defense” was the program’s motto.

Between classes I practiced contorting my mouth into a soundless No! Brushing my teeth, I imagined the padded assailant, with his gigantic foam head and mesh eyes and mouth, coming at me out of the darkness. I believed I was a top contender for the best showing at graduation, ready to take on whatever the instructor could throw my way. As I did in every aspect of my life, I wanted to win. But when the padded assailant came at me across the gym floor, I couldn’t hit him square. My kicks glanced off his shoulder. The heel of my palm, which should have jammed his foam nose into his foam skull, instead grazed his cheek. Whether from performance nerves or fear or something else, my blows never landed where I needed them to. After he backed away, everyone clapped and cheered. But I knew that, if it had been a real assault, I would have been in serious trouble.

I had to rebuild, remain ready. When I was in a parking deck or a bar bathroom, I kept imagining snapping my elbow back like a bow to strike someone behind me. I sparred with male friends in my early college years, building my confidence back from that poor graduation-day performance. If the time came, I’d be ready.

And who knows? Maybe if I’d been attacked through pure physical aggression, I would have been.

It’s 2004. I’m twenty-six and on the last leg of a trip to Greece, alone on the sunny top deck of a ferry, gliding across the Ionian Sea from Kefalonia to the mainland. The two women I’ve been traveling with have stayed behind on the island, but I’m leaving for home tomorrow. I’m lost in a book, feet on my luggage, when a man approaches me, speaking Greek. Surprised to learn I’m American, he switches to fluent English, and we chat. He is about twice my age and could be my professor or my uncle. He has on a denim button-down like my stepfather wears, sleeves rolled up to the elbows. He offers to show me a good hotel, give me a free tour of the Acropolis. His name is Alexander.

Perhaps you know where this is going, or think you do. I do not. I decide the man is just being hospitable, like all the Greeks I’ve met during my ten days traveling through the country. As we disembark from the ferry, he says he is a father, recently divorced, and was raised in Athens, where his mother still lives. He is on his way there to visit her. He has traveled the world as a pilot. Or so he tells me. This may be a version of the truth, or nothing like the truth whatsoever.

After we get to Athens, as I follow him through the streets to the hotel, he offers to pull my heavy luggage. When I say no, he seems irritated, and I wonder why. At the hotel I check into my room. He asks if he can leave his bag in my room until he can take it to his mother’s. I’ve been raised to comply with men’s suggestions as if they were commands, which is how they feel to me. So I agree. Back in the lobby he suggests I have a beer while he places a call. I’m not usually a day drinker, but it’s my last day of vacation. I give in.

Next we’re on a city train. The signs of preparations for the upcoming Olympics are everywhere. As the train jerks, I grip the pole so I don’t fall, and his sweaty hand slides against mine—by accident, I assume. I move my hand away.

We’re on his tour of the Acropolis. He is recounting mind-numbing details, which he knows because he is a “specialist in antiquities.” Acropolis means “highest city,” he says: a point from which all can be seen. I am tuning out, thinking of the nights I spent in Kefalonia riding behind a boy on his moped, no helmet, wind whipping my auburn hair as animals scurried from our headlight’s beam into the sandy darkness.

Feigning engagement, I lift my camera to my eye. Its shutter slides open. Light enters through the aperture, exposing crumbling limestone, mobs of tourists. The shutter closes, blocking the light.

We descend the hill. I mention to my guide that I haven’t eaten much all day. He suggests I sit in a square near his favorite spot while he goes to get food. I wait in the shade under an olive tree, and he disappears around the corner of a church.

I’m ready to be alone. I could leave. Oh, but his bag is in my room.

He returns with a chicken pita that tastes surprisingly bitter. Probably the spices are unfamiliar to my American palate. I say nothing. He eats too. I thank him and tell him I need to get back to the hotel; I have an early flight. He says just one drink at a famous bar, to complete my time in Athens.

There is a well-known Greek myth: The goddess Persephone, daughter of Zeus, is walking through a field of flowers at the base of a fertile valley, the sun warming her shoulders, when she becomes captivated by a narcissus at her feet—the most enchanting bloom she has ever beheld. As she reaches to pick this extraordinary specimen, she feels a rumbling. The ground quakes and swells. She loses her footing.

With a deafening crack the earth cleaves, parting grasses, dirt, and the crust beneath. From the void comes the sound of thundering hooves. Persephone glimpses the oil-black coats of muscled stallions, a cruel whip urging them on at top speed. Driving a chariot flanked by three-headed helldogs is a man Persephone recognizes—her uncle Hades.

He draws back the reins, and the steeds slide to a stop, shrouded in clouds of dust. Their muscles shimmy, twitch. He steps from his chariot.

Persephone is paralyzed in disbelief. This feels like danger, and yet it cannot be, for this is her uncle, someone she can trust, no? Hades seizes her arm. His breath hot against her ear, he whispers that he will make her Queen of the Underworld.

Persephone opens her mouth to scream, but there is no sound.

At the famous bar, Brettos, rainbow bottles extend to the towering ceiling. Golden light illuminates them like jewels. Staring up at them from my barstool makes my neck ache. When he hands me a shot of ouzo, I look into his black pupils, which match his black irises.

When in Rome . . . I sip my ouzo, shudder.

Seconds pass, or minutes, or hours. Waxen colors melt into me. I can no longer sit up. The edges of my vision slip. I’m being pulled down through the floor.

I am standing in a median with headlights streaking by. Words leak from my mouth: “Did you put something in my drink?”

“Why? Do you feel drunk? Me too!”

I have no idea where the hotel is, or even its name. My passport is locked in the safe in my room. His bag.

Through the streaking headlights he says, “Without me, you are a ship without a rudder.” His voice echoes from the back of a dark cave.

Blink. I awake in my hotel room. Wet sheets. Blink. The small room fills in around me: A cheap desk. A door. A sign with fire-safety procedures. Blink. I pass my hand over the sheets, bring my fingers to my nose. Urine. Mine? The clock says 4 AM. Blink. My flight home. Naked from the waist down, I haul myself into the bathroom. Blink. Heavy arms don’t want to move. I splash water over my body. Blink. Wasn’t someone here? A shadow. The smell of roasting meat and acrid armpits. Blink. I try to hurry, but I’m being pulled down, slow like honey.

From the back of a cab, which is driven by a woman younger than me, I spout fractured words that ricochet back at me through space and time. The driver listens to my story but does not know what to do. She drops me at the airport. My ears are full and pounding on the flight home. I am winged by black feathers that flap madly in my peripheral vision. Who was that man? What has he done to me?

Then I feed myself the poison pill: What have I allowed to happen?

Back home I see two ways to tell this story, each of them reinforced by different sources:

Version 1: Nothing terrible happened. I was naive, but I am OK. I could have controlled the situation better, though, and must do so next time, because it could have ended worse. I was lucky.

My mother: Maybe I was just overheated or dehydrated. The Greeks are very welcoming. Gigi and Grandpa’s friend Mr. Constantinapoulous would have given someone a tour like that. Let’s not think terrible things about this man.

The narrative on which I was raised: Always assume the best of people. Always put others first. If a wrong was committed, assume it was mine. If it hurt, pretend it didn’t happen. Pretend. Pretend.

My therapist: “Maybe when you wet the bed, he thought he’d killed you, and then he stopped. Maybe he left without raping you.”

Friends: “Were you dressed when you woke up?”

“Couldn’t you feel whether or not you’d had sex?”

“It’s good he didn’t steal your passport and your identity.”

“You’re lucky to be alive.”

Version 2: Possibly something happened, and I should have done more to prevent it. I know self-defense and can subdue a 250-pound man by snapping his shoulders back with my calves and wrecking his groin with one of my fists planted inside the other. I can change a tire alone on a rainy night. I can herd cattle on horseback. I can shoot a tin can dead center with a rifle from forty yards. I can talk obscure principles of international law. It was my duty to be vigilant, and I neglected that duty. I should have known on the ferry. I should have known when he offered to show me a hotel. My gut told me, but I ignored it. I knew. There’s no one else to blame. How could I not even know the name or location of where I was staying? I was absent-minded, checked out. Weak.

Other friends: “There were those two beers at the hotel, you said, and it was so hot. You hadn’t eaten most of the day, and ouzo is strong, you know.”

“This is why women should never be alone with strange men in other countries.”

“You said you had a bad feeling about him. Why didn’t you just take your shit and go?”

From a kaleidoscope of slivers, flashes, and shadows, the mind demands order. Coherence. Convincing fiction becomes indistinguishable from fact. When I told and retold the story, I cast myself as the gullible victim, the mark, the one who’d asked for it—whatever “it” was. I selected supporting details that proved I could have gotten away at this point or that. I made a case for the idea that I had known all along, yet I’d done nothing to protect myself. My repeated retellings wrote this version into my body, my brain.

Like a she-wolf’s, my nostrils flared at the scent of an older man across a room—his ripe sweat, his stale clothes. I tried to block the memory with alcohol, drugs, food, sex: Do what you want to me, then leave me alone. Hurt me; see if I care.

I thought perhaps I should go back to my mother’s approach: Let’s just assume the best. Yes, let’s pretend.

And pretending almost worked. For a while.

Over the next decade I finished law school, practiced law, stopped practicing law. I got married, divorced, remarried. My father died. I became an entrepreneur. I gave birth to twins: a one-pound, seven-ounce micropreemie, who survived, and her brother, who did not. Athens was a lifetime ago, buried beneath the rubble of so much else.

But how deeply are our traumas ever buried?

Pretending and keeping busy helped me stay distracted—or so I thought. What did it matter if I couldn’t say exactly why I burst into tears during every gynecological exam, or why, during sex, my body was in the bed while my mind was everywhere else? Always in the room there was a heaviness, a shadow just beyond the periphery. A three-headed helldog, snarling.

When I told my husband about Athens early in our relationship, he listened. When I brought it up again years later, he listened. If someone mentioned Greece when we were together, he found a way to change the topic. I thought of this behavior as protective. But I suppose I expected more than just listening. I hoped he’d understand, intuit, maybe help me uncover something to which I was blind—like why what had happened in Athens hurt so much when I couldn’t be sure anything had happened at all. When he didn’t do any of these things, I felt alone.

We took it to couples therapy, where I told the story as I always had, highlighting how I’d ignored hints that something terrible was looming, how I’d failed to protect myself.

“See what I mean?” he said to the therapist. “She knew! How can you know something bad is going to happen and just let it happen?”

I felt his fury, and his disappointment in me. This was the question I couldn’t answer, and again and again it led to shame. Overwhelming, unbearable shame.

“I don’t want this to turn into victim blaming,” the therapist said, but she didn’t elaborate.

I wonder sometimes whether things might have been different if I’d had the vocabulary to explain what had happened, or if my husband and family and friends had had the benefit of the women’s stories that poured out during the #MeToo movement. Instead I felt alone in that therapist’s room, maybe right down the hall from another woman who was feeling alone in another room with her own partner and her therapist, and also blaming herself, not knowing the damage she was doing to herself and to all those close to her.

I was yearning for my husband to help me revise my story, to rail against the version of myself I was presenting, to replace her with the woman he knew: adventurous, strong, steady, responsible, and intelligent—someone to whom this could happen only because the person who did it to her was devious, sinister. I wanted him to convince me that it wasn’t my fault. It’s also what I wanted from myself.

Instead we left the room so angry with each other that we couldn’t take the same elevator down.

I would eventually find a trauma therapist who could provide guidance, and I would see that I had to be the one to change my story. No one else could do it for me. I had to believe first that it wasn’t my fault in order for others to reflect that reality back to me. But at the time I just went back to pretending. If it weren’t for a chance discovery that would change everything, perhaps I still would be.

June 2014. Little Rock, Arkansas. I lie in bed reading as my husband snores gently next to me. Through the baby monitor on my bedside table I hear the soothing rise and fall of our two-year-old daughter’s breath.

I’m reading an essay by a woman who hitched a ride with a trucker, then many years later discovered he was a serial killer had who tortured, raped, and murdered women all across America. During the ride with him she had grown suspicious and hopped out of his cab. A close call. An “almost.”

I flash hot. What if I am not alone?

I snatch my phone from the bedside table, google “Athens Acropolis rape.” I scroll down and read, “The rapist with the cheese pie.” He sprinkled tranquilizers into women’s food. (The bitter taste.) He gave them alcohol. (The ouzo that burned my throat.) Scanning the entries, I see: “She was a tourist in Athens in 2005. At the Acropolis she was drugged and then raped.” The link leads to the blog of a Canadian journalist named Natalie Karneef. I pore over a story I thought belonged only to me, reading words that could just as easily have been my own. Four documented victims, including Karneef, were raped in 2005, the summer after I was in Athens: Canadian, Danish, and two Australian. All were young women traveling alone. All took tours of the Acropolis led by a pilot. All were drugged. What are the chances that the summer of 2005 was the first time he raped someone? What are the chances I was not raped? How many more of us are there?

Then his mug shot: The uncle. The one you’d never suspect. Dark-gray hair. Sun-leathered skin. Thin denim shirt. Eyes like black holes.

Blink. Roasting meat and acrid armpits. Blink. Alexander is on top of me. Blink. Alexander is gone. Blink. Alexander is, impossibly, on the screen of my phone in Little Rock. His name, of course, is not Alexander.

I try to shake my husband awake with the incomprehensible news, but he slips back to sleep. I fly to my computer and write to Natalie Karneef through hot tears, “I believe we were drugged and raped in Greece by the same man.”

For the first time, when telling my story, I have used the word raped.

By the next morning she has replied from Uganda, where she is working with AIDS orphans.

Dear Erin,

I’m sitting on the floor, reading your email on my phone, in total shock. There is no question it’s the same man. You’re right. There probably are countless other victims.

He is in prison. He has the option of appealing the sentence. I went through a series of attempted trials (at least eight—I lost count—they were canceled, postponed, delayed due to strikes, etc., including one I flew to Athens to attend in 2010). I probably don’t need to tell you how unhelpful the Greek authorities were.

I did not have to travel to Athens for the final trial, because it turned out I didn’t need to be present to give adequate evidence. This was a godsend, as I don’t know if I could have withstood another trip.

The day he went to prison was unforgettable. A giant weight lifted, eight years later.

And you know what I just realized? It was exactly a year ago from the day you wrote me.

There is so much more to say. Please, ask me any questions you want.

A year to the day.

All the years I was trying to pretend and hoping to forget, Natalie was crusading for his imprisonment. As soon as she woke the morning after her rape, she went to the emergency room. To the police. To more police. No one listened or cared.

In 2012 the rapist was sentenced to twelve years. A year later his sentence was reduced to ten years on appeal.

Natalie and I write back and forth, call, and Skype. The other women didn’t want to stay in touch, she says. With some leads from her I search the internet. I learn from Natalie that the “Acropolis rapist” married into a media family. (Does this explain the light, perhaps deleted, media coverage?) I find articles and posts in Greek that Google can’t translate. I want to go to Google headquarters and hold someone accountable for this.

On Google Earth I trace the route we took descending from the Acropolis. I land in the square where he told me to sit on the bench. There is the olive tree, near a building marked “Holy Church of Saint Nicholas Rangavas.” Using the cartoonish navigation hand, I click and pull at the buildings around which he disappeared and returned with the bitter pita.

Ready to press charges of my own, I reach out to the international human-rights activist who helped Natalie. Gather evidence, he says. To find the hotel name, I try to access credit-card information from more than a decade ago but discover I need a court order. Trying to track everything about the trip, I come across the wedding video of the boy on the back of whose moped I rode on the island of Kefalonia.

After weeks of furious phone calls and emails, I am stymied. I keep searching, convinced I can find the smoking gun if I just tap the right combination of keys.

After clicking through more than a hundred pictures of Brettos Bar, one halts me. It shows the left side of the bar, with what are likely the stools where he and I sat. I stare at my computer with singular focus until I lose my peripheral vision. I worry the edges of the barstool with my eyes. I beg it to reverse time, to not let me be sucked down into the black vortex of the floor. But all my worrying and begging can’t change the chemistry of two or three sips of ouzo mixing in my gut with his powder, amplifying it into a vicious poison that would sever the connection between my mind and my body.

Stilnox, the brand name of the powerful tranquilizer he used to drug women, is from the German stille nacht, or “still night.” Its generic name is zolpidem. In America it’s best known as Ambien. A “sedative-hypnotic” sleep aid, it puts the brains of those ingesting it into a state in between sleep and waking. The effects are exacerbated by combining it with alcohol, and it can cause somnambulance (sleepwalking, sleep-eating, sleep-shopping), parasomnia (performing tasks while asleep), inability to wake up, coma, and even death. Stilnox also lowers inhibitions and can make you willing to do something you otherwise would not—like getting into a cab with a man you suspect has just drugged you and returning to a hotel with him without screaming to everyone around you for help.

Stilnox poisons you against yourself. People under its influence often have little or no memory of events. Convenient. You probably won’t remember someone raping you, probably won’t recall much to help you make sense of what happened.

Paracelsus—the Renaissance physician, botanist, and alchemist credited as the father of toxicology—noted that there is poison in everything; the danger is in the dosage. What was it like for the rapist to experiment with dosages? How did he study? Did he get it right the first time? Did he ever go too far? I was drugged in July 2004, and Natalie and the (known) others in 2005. Was I one of his first victims? Or—in a scenario that seems more consistent with what I’ve learned about criminal behavior—had he been doing this for a long time? Perhaps he just grew careless over the years and finally got caught. Perhaps, as he gained confidence and aged, he began to slip, failing to calculate—or care—how soon the women needed to catch their return flights home, what flashes and slivers of memory they might use to fill in the details. Perhaps, as time went on, he dared to decrease the dose or take greater risks.

Almost impossible to believe, but his defense attorney was a woman just fourteen months older than me. She and I began practicing law within a few years of each other. As a lawyer I know that both sides need zealous representation for justice to prevail. Still, I can’t help but ask what might have made this woman take on the rapist’s case. In court how did she explain that four women from around the globe ran across the same man in the same city who told them the same story and poisoned them in the same way? I wonder if she ever thinks about the victims, ever wonders if there are more. Can she feel me in the world as something she can’t quite explain—a dark shadow in her peripheral vision, just out of reach?

Fall 2015. Rome, Italy. I’m on a girls’ trip with my mother, visiting the Borghese Gallery, when I round the corner into the room commanded by Bernini’s sculpture The Rape of Proserpina—Latin for Persephone. My mother and the others in our tour group breeze by me with oohs and ahhs, but my feet have turned to stone. Eleven years have passed since I was drugged by the rapist in Athens. Yet my chest still burns with ouzo. I could walk away, I think, but I am capable of getting through this, of daring to look at this marble story from every angle.

I move closer, stand at the feet of Persephone. The moment Hades seizes her, her horror at being captured, her attempt to flee—this is what Bernini set in stone. Persephone was lured, caught, tricked, and the grief of that realization is a weight in her eyes. Her desperate desire to escape pulses through her body. Her neck bends at an acute angle. Every toe is tensed. Two large tears lie frozen against her cheek. (Tears sting my eyes, too, but I know the price of looking away.) The flesh of her thigh and torso yields to Hades’s fingers, which press into her with such force that the veins and tendons of his hands rise. He is practically laughing, scoffing, knowing she cannot escape him, wanting to taunt her with it. Without me, you are a ship without a rudder.

The heel of Persephone’s left hand pulls the skin of Hades’s eye back toward his temple, but instead of gaining purchase, it merely glances off.

I do not find myself considering where the fault lies. Do you?

In the myth, after Hades drags Persephone to the underworld, he tricks her into eating pomegranate seeds, ensuring she will never fully escape him but must repeatedly return below ground, to the stille nacht.

From wherever the observer stands, it’s clear: Persephone will not be able to stop this. The power is not hers in this moment. Hades will drag her back with him. The story happened, is happening, will happen precisely this way.

But Persephone’s eyes are fixed on something. The fingers of her right hand gesture to a truth that is different. It is not possible to escape Hades’s dominion in this moment, but neither is this moment the ruin of her. Her power will come from that place she reaches for in the distance. Her power will come from what she will allow this moment to mean—provided she does not take the poison pill that will turn her against herself.

When the rapist was released from prison in 2015, long before he would have completed his original sentence, Natalie called to tell me the news. He was free to do it all again, should he so choose.

He lived halfway around the world and probably didn’t even know my name, yet I blinked into the darkness at 2:45 AM. His mug shot flashed through my mind in yoga. Out to dinner with friends, I felt pulled from the barstool. Could he come for me? For my daughter?

The progress I had made since learning I was not alone was galloping in reverse. I needed help.

In the waiting room of the trauma therapist, paperwork rattled in my hands. But in her office the chair was soft. A test revealed that my post-traumatic stress was “severe.” She offered writing and revision as a tool. I wrote down the story I had told myself and others for so long, and I read it aloud to her.

Then she asked me to imagine a court of law in which I needed to present the facts before a judge. The story I’d told myself would not be admissible.

“If you knew you would be raped,” the therapist asked, “would you have stayed?”

“Of course not.” The answer flew from my mouth before I recognized what she was doing.

Of course I hadn’t known.

And what of Natalie and the others? They’d found no reason to see this older man who’d approached them in public as a threat. They’d never imagined that drugs would be mixed in their food, that behind the facade of a friendly history buff was someone evil. Could it be that I actually hadn’t known? Maybe there hadn’t even been clues. Maybe I was using hindsight to write a fictional story, then clinging to it because it was the only story I’d known how to write.

The case I had made against myself began to crumble and was replaced by Version 3:

I hadn’t known anything. He was a predator, and I was just a woman who fit his profile and happened across his path.

This new version still felt a little put on, like I was trying to fake it until I believed it. But the more I retold it, word by word, the more the black shadows receded.

When I was taking Model Mugging, I didn’t know I was growing up in a society committed to a script of rape that didn’t reflect the ways most rapes actually happen; a script that handed men permission to behave aggressively and offered women only two roles: fighter or victim. How many of us, given no clear target, have ended up fighting ourselves?

Perhaps because of this script, I used to believe I could never heal without confronting the rapist. I imagined flying to Athens, finding his address, and knocking on his door. I imagined it being opened by his wife. Or by his daughter. Or by him. Maybe he would see me and remember. Maybe not. Perhaps I would scream at him, throw something, cut him with a broken bottle, bash his nose in with the heel of my hand. If I wasn’t going to continue to be a victim, I believed, I had to fight.

For years I was tormented by my own thoughts: What if that very moment he was boarding a ferry, climbing up to the sundeck, scanning the rows of benches, selecting a woman, pulling her out of the book she was reading, and forever writing himself into the story of her life?

Was I really so fragile that a man who’d come into my life for just a few hours could leave me so far out at sea?

Yes, we are all that fragile. But also our stories can return us to shore.

November 2017. I fly to Montreal. From there I take a train to Ottawa. At the station Natalie awaits me with wild curls and open arms.

Saying, “You just kind of have to,” she takes me to a Tim Hortons, where I experience terrible coffee and average doughnuts. At a nail salon we discuss the merits of this and that color and talk about how we knew our first marriages were going to fail. We go to a tea shop in the village of Almonte and enjoy savory pies and mini cakes. Although I’ve brought enough clothes for a two-month stay, I haven’t packed well for the Canadian fall. Seeing me shiver, Natalie helps me shop for a hat, and I’m warm the rest of the trip.

We take a road trip to Montreal, her VW hatchback piled with my excess luggage, and she shows me all her favorite spots from when she lived in that city. I brush up on my French. We visit indie bookstores all over town. When store clerks and strangers ask how we became friends, we say, “It’s a long story,” instead of, We both had encounters with the same rapist.

Natalie, of course, barreled into her pain afterward: flying to Athens, retraumatizing herself in the courtroom, talking to reporters and human-rights advocates, and maintaining the blog that led me to her. At times I envy how she took charge while I tried to pretend everything was fine. But with both approaches came suffering. What if there isn’t a right or wrong way to live through something like this? What if, in such situations, suffering is inevitable?

Every morning after breakfast Natalie returns to her room for a long meditation—a practice she says she needs to get through each day after Athens. When she emerges, we ask each other: How are you doing today? What are you feeling in your body? Do you want to talk about it? Set it aside? Do you want me to read your tarot cards? Shall we do something fun?

Her voice grows stronger inside my head, like the most compassionate version of myself: You did exactly what you knew how to do to take care of yourself the best you could.

What have I been so afraid would occur if I acknowledged that something terrible happened to me? If I just let it be true instead of trying to block, or dismiss, or explain, or attempt to fix it—all of which is impossible anyway? Did I think living with my pain would reduce me to ash? Instead it has opened me to a fuller experience of being human. If we don’t confront our most painful stories, we lose the opportunity to share them with others. The cost of pretending is suffering alone.

After we said goodbye at the airport terminal, I must have turned back to see Natalie half a dozen times. Every time, she had turned to look at me too. This is how I remember us: both turning toward each other again and again. Whenever I forget that what happened was not my fault or lapse into a fearful place, which I still sometimes do all these years later, I reach for Natalie. She lives in Turkey now, and I’m still in Little Rock, but I never stop feeling like she’s right here with me, her story a mirror to my own, reminding me what is fiction and what is fact.