OPINION | April Wallace: Remembering with good reason; life complex after traumatic event | The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette

It’s been nine years since a stranger attacked and kidnapped me in broad daylight — since I escaped and warned other people that he was at large. I won’t rehash it. Yes, frankly, I am a bit tired of telling the story.

Now that the predator is behind bars, the retelling has served its purpose. Still, every year there’s news of other attackers and other women, most who weren’t so lucky to escape with only a concussion, 18 months of debilitating headaches and PTSD.

Have I recounted the details enough that it’s just a story now? In a way, yes. There’s distance there. Who knows how many interviews I’ve given. First to cops and broadcast stations, then to detectives and eventually attorneys, judge and jury.

Since then it’s become one way I can give back to my alma mater, letting young people on their way to becoming journalists practicing interviewing me, the victim of a violent crime.

By now I can think of it benignly as just another thing that’s happened to me. Though once a year I allow myself to revisit it fully. I think through every part and let myself feel it all. To process it, to grieve and to acknowledge that the danger is never truly gone.

The telling of the attack has not changed over time. But it is, for me, connected to this certain time of year. On that very first day that has an early fall breeze and everyone hits the trails, it becomes impossible not to remember what happened.

I did encounter my attacker after the fact, over the course of the trial process, and testified against him as he sat in the very same courtroom. It wasn’t the easiest thing to do, but I was bolstered by a slew of other strong women.

My book club, a group of close female friends, sat with me every day, physically surrounding me like a protective force. Another strong woman, someone I’d interviewed, came and sat with me in the waiting room just to take my mind off things.

I survived both the attack and the trial, and it hasn’t taken running from me. I still run, and I still enjoy it.

But these days I sense, retrospectively, a bit of naivete from those first years as a crime victim. I was so bent on not letting Lake Fayetteville go. Now, nearly a decade in, I know it will never be the same place that it was for me, and also that that’s OK.

Staying in this line of work has forced me back out into the community and been helpful in assimilating back to normal life, although I still detect the effects. Some parts of the job are harder, due to my experience, than others.

My hope in retelling has been not to inspire pity but resolve. Not to scare others into not running, but to educate yourself: no matter how prepared you are, or how smart in your choices, things happen.

I remember it now with gratitude for how it turned out and carried on, going about my life. It’s been long enough that I don’t begin each day marveling that I’m alive. That’s part of the business of actually living, getting back to all of it, even the parts that aren’t awe-inspiring.

But I do take plenty of time to be grateful for the parts of reality I particularly love–having a drink and a chat on the porch with my husband, our kids climbing in our bed for snuggles, a quiet walk to take in a sunrise or clear my head.

Life, even in all its imperfection, is something to be thankful for.