A Gross Anniversary

Seven years ago today, I woke up at 6:30 am to get ready for work. I went out to the living room of the apartment that my best friend and I were living in Louisville, and I turned on the TV, as I always did. I noticed that there were messages on the answering machine, and when I hit the button, I heard my mother yelling like a maniac on the machine. I called her and she told me that something had happened at my apartment building, and she was calling to make sure I was okay. I told her I was fine, that she was crazy, and hung up.

That is when I went back in the living room and started to watch the news. On the news, one of the local news girls was standing in front of a building that had very distinctive shrubbery. This shrubbery looked very familiar. I leaned over to the window beside me and pulled the blinds down.

That news girl was standing just below my window.

This is when the police came and knocked on the door. I went and woke Eleisha up because the cops wanted to talk to us. The man that had been living upstairs had murdered his girlfriend. After months of abuse, he had snapped during an argument. He had stabbed her several times, then he took the woman's four year old daughter to her grandmother's and called the police to turn himself in.

It was the most insane, shocking day of my entire life.

Long story short, Eleisha had heard some things that night that turned out to be evidence, and she ended up having to go testify against this guy twice. I cannot express to you the absolute horror of having to sleep in that apartment that night. We pulled my futon mattress into the living room and slept on it together because we were so scared. Scared of what, I don't know. He had turned himself in, but in that moment, we knew that we were not safe. The world is not a safe place.

We had moved into that apartment in February of that year, and then in July this had happened. We had never been away from home before, and this is what we have to deal with when we finally do get away. It is a day that I will never forget as long as I live.

I will also never forget the looks on the faces of that woman's family when we went to court. I will never forget seeing her little girl playing outside. I will never forget how we screamed and hit the ceiling with a broom because they were too loud all the time. I will never forget feeling like we could have saved her life if we had realized what we were hearing instead of just being annoyed that we couldn't hear the TV.

Seven years later, and I still woke up with a sick feeling in my stomach.