Hope

When I was eleven years old, there was a rapist who lived in my neighborhood. He stalked the area for several years before he was caught, attacking women and children. 

He attacked when it was raining. Always when it was dark and stormy outside. And often in the afternoons or evenings when the light was that strange dusky blue-gray and you can’t tell what is shadow and what is just a fuzz in your eye. And when mothers are coming home with their children, carrying armfuls of bags in from the car and not looking around them at the drizzling rain.

There were lots of trees around the neighborhood and large swatches of brush growing between the streets where the houses were lined up backyard to backyard. He liked to sit at the treeline on the edges of the yards. He carried a gun. He wore a yellow t-shirt. 

My memories from that time are clouded - partly by time and partly because any information I was given was thoroughly filtered by my parents. They wanted me to know what was out there. They told me not to speak to any men who approached me and I didn’t recognize. They said that if I saw a man outside in the yard that I should run inside the house and lock the door. They didn’t have to tell me that I should bring my three younger siblings with me. 

They told me about the rapist, and then I told my sister and brothers bits and pieces of what they said. I knew by eleven that you can’t just tell a five-year old what rape is. Or murder. Or about the woman who was a nanny for two kids next door and had all of her teeth knocked out because she was trying to lock the door against him. 

My best friend, Sharon, lived across the street. Behind her house was a field with wild grass and a creek. We built forts back there and stored food and made blood pacts. We asked her mom if we could sleep in our fort - we had waterproofed it with an old canvas sheet. She said no, and told us to come in before it started to get dark. One day, we went out to the fort and all of our food tins were open. There were lids and wrappers all over the ground. I said it was a raccoon. Sharon said it was the boy who lived next door. He was six, and he liked to run around our houses naked and drive the lawnmower. His parents were always screaming. 

For a while, every time we saw a car on the street that we didn’t recognize, my sister and brothers and I would drop what we were doing, run inside the garage, and wait for it to pass. If it lingered, we went inside for the rest of the day. We didn’t go outside when it rained. 

One afternoon, my sister and I were in the front yard alone and a man stopped on the street in his suburban and asked us for directions. We ran inside. 

One time, I was home sick with my mom and a man came to our back door and tried to make us open it. He was waving a white envelope. He had come through our back gate and our garage. My mom called the police and yelled at him to leave. 

After a few years, they caught him. He was hiding in the field behind Sharon’s house, where we built our fort. 

I live in New York City now, and I have learned the difference between a scream of laughter, a scream of anger, and a scream of someone in pain. I didn’t flinch when I saw a rat eating another dead rat, or when a homeless person tried to climb in my Uber with me. I kept walking when a man pulled down his pants and shit in the middle of Fifth Avenue on a Friday afternoon. On the surface, I am unflappable. I have the New York glare. But underneath, I am so afraid. 

I think about death all the time. When my husband shuts the door to our apartment behind him in the morning, I pray that no one will hit him with a car on his bike ride. I think about the girl from my college that had a seizure in the shower and drowned, my grandmother who was diagnosed with a brain tumor and died a month later, the three children and three adults from the church I grew up in who were killed in a school shooting.

I’m 27. I don’t even have children, but I’m afraid that I won’t be able to. That they won’t make it to adulthood. That my grandfather will die before he meets his great-granddaughter, who will be named after his wife. Every moment that I live is shadowed by the fear of my heart forgetting how to beat and my lungs forgetting how to expand and contract. 

I know that fear of death is the death of life. I can’t control it, so why should I fear it? Picturing all of the ways things could go horrifically wrong won’t add years to my life. It’s a sort of compulsion, I guess. I just don’t want to be surprised. In some twisted way, it feels like a talisman against it: if I can imagine the worst thing, then surely it won’t happen. What are the odds? 

The rapist is in jail, with decades still to go. That day that he came to my back door and sneered at us through the glass door, my mom called the police and they came right away. He fled and was caught months later. He was sloppy. And disgusting. And evil. 

He stole so much innocence from me at eleven. So much trust and carelessness. The awareness that there is evil in the world, concentrated and random as a lightning strike, is something that most everyone realizes at one point or another. Somewhere in between holding my sister’s hand as we ran to the garage and finding torn wrappers in a fort in the woods, I realized that I wasn’t safe in my neighborhood or in my fenced backyard or even in my house. A man I didn’t know was standing in the bushes in a yellow t-shirt and watching me to see when I was at my weakest. 

Nature or nurture - whichever has won out, it doesn’t matter - I am afraid. It’s in my bones, in my heart, in my lungs. I fear death and I fear evil. 

But I am 27, and I am alive. I am learning, or trying to learn, to hold that fear along with joy. Peace. Hope. The worst can always happen. But the best can also happen. I don’t want fear to be the narrator of my life. It won’t stop pain and suffering from coming. I don’t want to close myself up and harden like a stone. So I honor that fear and give it space to be in my heart. And then try to let it go, to exhale it. Because there is so much beauty and joy in life too. 

And so this is my hope: that fear of pain means that there is growth on the other side, that fear of being hurt means you have opened yourself to love, and that fear of loss means you have something beautiful to lose.