The Long Walk: A Journey Through Fear, Memory, and Healing

When survivors tell their stories, many begin by saying, “It started as a normal day.”

My story didn’t.

The morning of June 18, 1993, began with heartbreaking news. A family member called to tell us that my cousin, Yokie, had been found deceased.

My mother, my aunt, and I spent the day with family. We drove to be with relatives who were grieving, and I remember sitting quietly in a room filled with sadness. Family members talked, cried, and mourned. I remember staring at a recliner for what felt like hours. I don’t know why that particular chair stayed with me all these years, but it did.

I sat silently watching, soaking up the grief that filled the room and wondering how someone so sweet could leave us so early. I remember hearing bits and pieces of conversations, different versions of events, and details that didn’t quite make sense to me. The adults were talking, but I wasn’t really part of those conversations. I sat quietly, listening and trying to piece together what had happened while watching the people I loved mourn.

We stayed there all day. Eventually, night fell, and we drove home.

I was exhausted.

When my mother and aunt decided to go to the grocery store, I begged my mom to let me stay home. She was reluctant, but eventually she agreed.

I still think about that evening.

Not because my mother did anything wrong. She didn’t.

Like most teenagers, I wasn’t expecting danger to come knocking at my door. I wasn’t thinking about worst-case scenarios. I wasn’t thinking that something terrible was about to happen. I was simply at home, believing I would be okay.

At some point, there was a knock at the door. I opened it, and it turned out to be someone I knew. I never could have imagined what would happen next.

After he entered the house, he looked toward the back of the home, in the direction of my mother’s bedroom. It seemed as though he was trying to determine whether anyone else was there. Once he realized I was home alone, his attention shifted to me.

What happened next would change the course of my life.

Not just my body, but my mind.

Within moments, he turned to me and said the word “RAPE”, and attacked me.

He grabbed me by my throat and threw me against the wall. A glass picture frame shattered as my body hit it. He began to strangle me, forcing me down onto the broken glass beneath us. At the time, I didn’t feel the cuts. My focus was on trying to breathe. It wasn’t until later that I realized how much I had been cut due to the glass I had landed on.

I thought I was going to die.

My head felt like it was going to explode. My eyes felt as though they were being pushed from their sockets. Panic consumed me. Terror consumed me.

Then everything became white.

I remember seeing a bright white light. I remember seeing flashes of things I suddenly realized I might never do. Dreams. Milestones. Pieces of a future that seemed to be slipping away before it had even begun.

I remember thinking about my mother. I imagined her coming home and finding me there. That thought terrified me almost as much as the attack itself.

At some point, he told me that if I stopped screaming, he wouldn’t kill me. I listened and allowed my body to go still.

After a series of instructions and threats, he told me to pretend to be his girlfriend. Then we left the house on foot.

I remember walking through the drizzle and beneath the streetlights as we moved from one place to another. There were several destinations that night, but what has stayed with me all these years is not necessarily the places themselves. It is the fear that lived in the space between them.

Every time we started walking again, I wondered where we were going and what would happen when we got there. I didn’t know what was waiting for me at the next location, and with each step came the fear that the next place might be the

Those walks carried so much dread. The uncertainty. The fear of not knowing where my steps would lead or what would be waiting for me when I got there.

The sense that each step was possibly leading me closer to death.

The day began with grief as my family mourned the loss of Yokie.

Before that day was over, I would experience a loss of my own.

Not a physical death, but the loss of safety, certainty, innocence, and the belief that life would continue as expected.

A part of me survived that night.

But a part of me was left behind on that floor.

I find myself returning to that moment, to the shattered glass, the white light, the fear, and the walk into the darkness.

Sometimes it feels as though I never fully left.

As much as my life has moved forward, part of me remains frozen in those moments between the strangulation and the walk. Part of me is still that fourteen-year-old girl trying to understand what is happening, wondering if she is going to live or die.

Perhaps that is why the themes of my Instagram reel Forever 14 and The White Room continue to find their way into my writing.

Because those moments did not simply happen to me.

In many ways, they became a place I have spent the last three decades trying to leave.

And yet, I always seem to find my way back.

Not because I want to stay there, but because some stories and journeys deserve to be remembered, celebrated, and reflected upon.

And perhaps because the fourteen-year-old girl I used to be deserves to be found.

And with every listening ear, every word of encouragement, and every act of support, she heals a little more.

Little by little, she comes back to life.