It was April, last year. I was on an evening out with friends to celebrate one of their birthdays. We hadn't been all together for a couple of weeks; it was a perfect evening, as we were all reunited.
At the end of the evening, I caught the last underground train back to the other side of London. The journey was smooth.
I got back to my local station and I began the 10-minute walk home.
As I turned the corner onto my street, my house in sight up ahead, I heard footsteps behind me that seemed to have approached out of nowhere and were picking up pace.
Before I had time to process what was happening, a hand was clapped around my mouth so that I could not breathe, and the young man behind me dragged me to the ground, beat my head repeatedly against the pavement until my face began to bleed, kicking me in the back and neck while he began to assault me, ripping off my clothes and telling me to " shut up, " as I struggled to cry for help.
With each smack of my head to the concrete ground, a question echoed through my mind that still haunts me today: " Is this going to be how it all ends? "
Little could I have realized, I'd been followed the whole way from the moment I left the station. And hours later, I was standing topless and barelegged in front of the police, having the cuts and bruises on my naked body photographed for forensic evidence.
Now, there are few words to describe the all-consuming feelings of vulnerability, shame, upset and injustice that I was ridden with in that moment and for the weeks to come. But wanting to find a way to condense these feelings into something ordered that I could work through, I decided to do what felt most natural to me: I wrote about it.
It started out as a cathartic exercise. I wrote a letter to my assaulter, humanizing him as " you, " to identify him as part of the very community that he had so violently abused that night.
Stressing the tidal-wave effect of his actions, I wrote: " Did you ever think of the people in your life? I don't know who the people in your life are. I don't know anything about you. But I do know this: you did not just attack me that night. I'm a daughter, I'm a friend, I'm a sister, I'm a pupil, I'm a cousin, I'm a niece, I'm a neighbor; I'm the employee who served everyone coffee in the café under the railway. And all the people who form these relations to me make up my community. And you assaulted every single one of them. You violated the truth that I will never cease to fight for, and which all of these people represent: that there are infinitely more good people in the world than bad."
