The beginning

Dry spaghetti flew out of the box and all over the floor. It cracked and splintered and fell into the cracks and splinters of the badly finished wood floor beneath my feet. Cackles escaped the mouths of me and my best friend of the moment, Ashli Kanzler. My roommate came running into the kitchen to see what all the commotion was about and just scoffed when he saw the scene.

We were stoned and making pasta. Simple joys like this made up my entire life at the time. I was enrolled in college and making easy A's. I was living off student loans with a part-time job that Ashli got me as a waitress at a mediocre tex-mex restaurant. I was learning to play the guitar and living in a beautiful garden apartment with a bonfire pit, a comfortable front porch, and a host of friends that I almost always found myself laughing with. It was a time when everything was beautiful and nothing hurt.

The water was boiling and I can't remember much else except that I was getting tired. So after dinner I turned in to my little mother-in-law apartment behind the Florida-cracker style house that was my home. Ashli was going to be staying in my room that evening but wasn't quite ready to retire herself.

"Just leave your door unlocked for me", she said.

It was something we had done countless times before and I felt pretty comfortable with. Little did I know that just a couple hours later I would awaken to a big, hulking man beside me in my bed and Ashli would be no where to be found. I'll spare the gory details of the attack. The event is still as fresh in my mind as it was when it originally happened a year and a half ago. I was able to muster the strength to break free of my bed and get my phone which was on the table on the other side of the room. I spun around to flip on the light just in time to see the man struggling with my blankets which were wrapped around his ankles and slam into the french doors of my suite, leaving a nice, clean palm print on the inside of the glass. My newly acquired kitten escaped with the intruder and I ran after them both, clutching the cat in the darkness as my only protection. Like an idiot, the man ran right into a trap on the side of my apartment. Trying to escape through what looked like an alley way, he was blocked by brush and random garbage stored behind my apartment by the previous tenant. He had no other choice but to turn around and meet me, face to face, just before hopping over the fence in one swift motion. He landed on the other side with a thud. This was the second time splinters of something fell to the floor beneath my feet, but this time it was splinters from the wooden fence planks that broke underneath his weight.

I screamed. I screamed for God. I screamed for Ashli. I screamed into my cell phone as I placed a call to her trying to explain the events of what just occured. She was asleep on the couch in my living room, but in less than ten seconds, she was outside my backdoor with my roommate and his friend in tow. I screamed the name of the man whose face I saw for that split second. I screamed at the 911 operator I wouldn't have been smart enough to call in that state of panic had it not been for my fast-thinking roommate. And I screamed at the hospital, to which I was escorted in a police car, as half a dozen faces stood before my open legs and starred at my vagina.

This was the night my entire life changed and how I ended up sitting here at the window of my New York City apartment. A lot happened between now and then though. You will read my story here.