Dimples on the Edge

This past weekend, early Sunday morning around 5:45am, I was attacked while walking home. I had been out for the evening with friends and we rode in a taxi altogether. We separated at a common stop for all of this and my walk was only 10 minutes.

Normally, my neighborhood is pretty lively through all hours of the evening, but it was very empty. I saw two men ahead of me and kept them within my line of vision and remained behind them. Then one of them stopped to pee in the street and I continued walking to hopefully get home sooner. They heard my heels clicking and started walking behind me, so I switched sides of the street and kept them in my periphery. I saw them again switch sides and start to get closer, and as I prepared to run, one of them lunged at me.

He grabbed my arm and began pulling me towards him, so I screamed “NO” at the top of my lungs, repeatedly. Surprisingly, this caused him to drop my arm and I was able to get away. In doing so, another man walked up to me and asked if I needed help. He had been walking in the opposite direction and I asked him to accompany me to my building door.

At first, he was fine, but then started talking about “I’m so hungry”, “we should stop for a bite to eat”, “where is the nearest restaurant, let me take you”, and it was peculiar. Fortunately, I had taken out my keys and started slowing down my pace. He was too busy talking and didn’t notice when I slipped into my building until I closed the door. He ran up to it and started shouting.

While for me, this was all very harrowing, I fully recognize that it could have been much worse. That does not dismiss the terror I felt in that moment. It was disgusting for complete strangers to feel they had a right to my body in any way. When I have told that story to friends and loved ones, their questions all sort of center in their own attempts to rationalize what happened. Not in a way that blamed me, but in a way that tried to make the events that happened make sense. To me, the only thing that makes sense is that no matter where I was, what I was wearing, what time of day it was, the common denominator is men.

There is something terribly wrong with our society and the way men behave in the world.