Kill the Silence

by Monika Korra

  So when Robin’s sister told me, “I just want to see Robin smile again,” I knew how she felt and what I had to do.

  I contacted Robin and we arranged to meet. Waiting for him to show up, I was more anxious than I’d ever been in my life. I talked myself into and out of a half dozen or so outfits, rehearsed conversations, and imagined what it would be like to have him wrap me in his arms again to tell me that everything was going to be okay.

  Reality met my expectations. Robin and I shared how miserable we’d been being apart, how much time we spent thinking and wondering about the other person, and how much we missed being able to talk with each other. Robin wasn’t naturally as shy as I was, and he’d had other girlfriends before, but he told me that he’d never felt as comfortable being himself around another person as he had with me. I told him that I felt the same way, and tried again to explain to him that I’d had to do what I thought was best. He told me that he understood, that he couldn’t really understand all that I’d been through, but that the only thing that made any sense to him was being with me.

  In an instant, all of the pain our breakup had caused was wiped away. I was amazed by how a simple touch and a simple word could so alter how I felt and what I thought. When I was with Robin, I felt like I did after a great yoga session. I was relaxed and at ease. The tension I seemed to carry around with me the rest of the time, the pressure I put on myself to succeed, to get the best grades, to set a PR, all seemed to just dissipate. I’d been doing well in classes and sometimes on the track, but it all felt hollow. Not being able to share it with someone I loved and cared about deeply made all those efforts seem like empty gestures, a shout of joy swallowed up in a vacuum. With Robin back by my side, things made sense. I was able to put my priorities in better order and see that all of the other worries I had were just preoccupations, not something I could really build a happy and satisfying life around.

  —

  ROBIN AND I picked up from where we’d left off. We spent as much time as we could manage together. I still wanted to study and complete the mission that I’d started at the beginning of the semester. Robin respected that, and my efforts in the classroom paid off: I earned straight A’s for the semester.

  Still, the ups and downs continued. I focused on the ten thousand meters for the rest of the season, leading up to the conference championship meet from May 13 to 16 in Orlando. We were leading the competition after the first day, but days two and three saw us slipping down the leader board. I had to be realistic. The previous year, the winner in the ten thousand had set the meet record, running a 34:41.14. That was more than two minutes faster than I’d run at Mt. Sac. Instead of thinking of winning the race outright, I focused on bettering my time. Running in April in Walnut, California, is a lot different from running in mid-May in Orlando, Florida. Everyone has to compete under the same conditions, but the heat and humidity really drained me. After five laps I felt just like I did that first race back. I wanted to walk off that track. I had no energy left in my body. But I refused to stop, and I pushed through to the end, feeling like I had raced at least a marathon as I crossed the finish line. I hung in there to finish in 37:44.49, for twelfth place. I didn’t beat my PR and I didn’t earn us any points. We wound up finishing fifth in the conference. It was hard to think of the seniors on the team ending their collegiate careers on such a down note, but for the underclassmen like Silje, Kristine, Viktoria, and me, the proverbial “you’ll get them next year” still applied.

  —

  JUST BEFORE I was ready to head home to Norway for the summer, I received another phone call from Erin. The trial had been postponed again. Something about the docket being full, not enough courtrooms, a busy schedule for the judge, a big city, and a lot of cases to be tried. “Sorry. Don’t be discouraged. We’ll make this happen.”

  I tried to focus on the good things those last few days before I left to return home. Just before I left, Robin and I spent the day together. The campus was strangely quiet, the carillon sounding almost plaintive, as if it were asking where everyone had gone. We were in the between time—the spring semester over, graduation done, the summer session not yet going—and that seemed to match my mood. Some things done, others still on the horizon. Maybe I was getting some of that good balance back that I’d had with Robin before. Maybe I could define a little bit differently what it meant to succeed. When I was back with Robin, I was able to see that when we were separated, I had become like a little grade-earning, time-counting machine. I’d recognized that fact before we were back in touch, and I was frightened. But I didn’t know how else to respond at the time. At least being that way meant that people wouldn’t see me as broken. They’d see me succeeding, but they wouldn’t see me as happy—at least not as most of the people I knew thought of it.

  Robin and I walked holding hands through campus. We’d spent the day playing tennis, then eating frozen yogurt. We had no particular destination in mind, but as if drawn by gravity, we wound up outside the Dedman Center, a place where we’d both spent so much of our time working out. We sat on the steps of one of the monuments outside it. From there, I could see the tennis courts where I’d first seen Robin playing tennis, the place where we first met. I’d been too shy to say hello to him that first time, but things had worked out.

  In the last dying rays of the evening, we both lay down and stared into the soon-to-be-night sky. Robin slipped his hand into mine, and I felt really at peace for the first time since the attack, no other thoughts than that I was exactly where I wanted to be at that moment, and that I simply had to trust that time and distance wouldn’t matter. Though many things were out of my control, they were going to work out; the effort I’d put in was going to pay off.

  —

  I CAN SEE now that I made some mistakes in how I approached things in the immediate aftermath of the rape. I went out too hard, too soon, and I “blew up” at the most crucial part of the contest. I had no finishing kick the last four hundred or so yards of the three thousand when you try to go into a higher gear. I had to stay relaxed while running, keep my thoughts quiet and few. Tensing up depleted too much of my energy. Rushing and pressure and focusing only on the goals and times and not the experiences themselves took me out of the moment. I was thinking too much about the ends of things, the results—my time in a race, the trials and the men being sentenced, getting past the effects of the rape. When you spend that much time worrying about putting things behind you—other runners, bad experiences, and the rest—you don’t have time for the present or the future.

  A few days after that peaceful day with Robin, I flew home alone for summer break. I was exhausted by the trip, and as soon as I got home and chatted briefly with my mom and dad, I staggered up the stairs. When I flipped on the light switch, I let out a squeal of joy. My mom and dad had completely redecorated my room for me. My favorite color combination is black-and-white, and the new comforter, the curtains, the nightstand and dressers were all in that scheme. I ran back down the stairs and threw my arms around the both of them and told them how much I loved what they’d done and loved them. When I saw their faces and realized how happy it had made them to make me so happy, I nearly started crying.

  My mom sensed that a fresh start with a different look would help erase some of the bad memories I had of the sleepless nights and the horrible nightmares I’d had in that room the last time I was home. So many times when someone has to deal with a bad occurrence in life, and I can remember doing this myself with other friends and family, people will say to the person who is in need of help, “Let me know if there is anything that I can do.” We all have good intentions when we say that, but it puts the burden of making an active choice on the person who is already most likely feeling like a burden, has little energy, and is struggling to get by. My mom and dad took the initiative to do something for me. They knew me well enough to know what would please me, but honestly, even if I had come home and they’d decorated my room in plaid and polka dots, I would have bee
n happy that they’d done something for me to show how much they cared.

  I was resolved to pace myself better that summer, and I was grateful that Robin was going to join me in Norway. He was the one who preached the importance of relaxing and pacing myself, and with him around most of the summer, I think I passed his class in the fine art of chilling. I still ran, did some competitions. I kept to cross-country races and road races where I didn’t really have any times to compare to. I didn’t want that kind of pressure over the summer, so I wasn’t completely obsessed with my results. I loved running back in Europe, seeing women I’d competed against before and simply enjoying the fact that I could run, that I could move, and that I was very far away from Dallas and the impending trial.

  I was still kept apprised of any developments and delays, either via phone or e-mail, and having an ocean between the courthouse—and the jail where the suspects were being held—and me definitely helped me keep things in a better perspective.

  It helped that Robin was there, but he was going to stay in Norway to pursue a job opportunity after I returned to Dallas in August. I had mixed feelings about that. His remaining in Norway gave me hope that the two of us might have a future together. But I wanted him in Dallas with me. I still had two years to go before I would graduate. I wanted him there, but not for the same reasons as before—not so that I could feel safe. Those men didn’t pose a danger to me anymore, but whenever I was sad, angry, frustrated, or whatever, Robin seemed to know what to do or to say to help ease my mind. I was nervous that I would return to being the machine I had become the spring semester of 2010—the too focused, too intent, too preoccupied woman too in a hurry to put everything behind her. I’d have to keep that “Robin balance” on my own. Worse, the first trial had been postponed again, until October. How would I handle that without Robin there with me?

  That summer at home made me feel like even without Robin there with me, I’d do well in facing the trials. I had been able to rest and store up a lot of energy. Even with Robin around, I spent as much time with Anette as I could. She had been practicing yoga for a while before I started, and we took classes together. For me, at first, yoga was about stretching my muscles and breathing. I didn’t have her full sense of it as a philosophy, a way to work with your mind and your emotions to get to a better place. As the summer went on, and Anette talked to me about that element, I became convinced that yoga was going to be one of my keys to surviving what lay ahead. For the most part, though, I tried to stay focused on the present and enjoy the time I had with the people I loved.

  The change-in-scenery effect also came into play when I returned to Dallas. For the fall of 2010, Kristine, Silje, and I got an apartment together off campus. I don’t think I realized until we were in the new place how bad the energy had been in that previous apartment, the cramped married student housing that we’d escaped into.

  Anette had accompanied me back to Dallas, and that meant everything to me. I’d come to rely on Robin to supplement my sense of security. Without him there, Anette stepped into that role. Having her with me the first week back was wonderful. Each day, we attended yoga classes, where we practiced staying in the moment, and I found that focusing even more intently on what my body was doing, in a way that was different from running, proved very relaxing. We went shopping, took long walks, tanned by the pool, and simply enjoyed life. We didn’t talk much about what was to come—the trial—and treated the week like we were on holiday.

  Watching Anette be driven off in a taxi to the airport, I felt that all-too-familiar sensation of glad/sad. We’d had such a great time together, but her leaving meant that summer break was truly over. It also meant that I had to focus anew on the trial. Whatever lessons I had learned about breathing, staying in the moment, relaxing, and all the rest got stowed away like summer outfits giving way to sweaters and coats.

  I switched into machine mode again, in workouts and in classes, and I felt the stress and tension of what I was going to have to face working its way through my body, conquering it.

  I trusted Erin and Brandon, but the whole legal system seemed so complicated to me. I wanted those men to stay in jail for the rest of their lives, and I worried about whether a jury would be willing to sentence them to that. I figured that anyone would understand that what they had done was completely awful, that was clear, but could the jury put themselves in my shoes? Would they understand just how horrific those moments were and how much my life had been altered by the actions of those men, despite my best efforts to establish a new normal?

  I tried so hard not to think about the trial and my attackers, yet it felt like my efforts had the opposite effect. I remember reading for a class an article about the pink elephant phenomenon. If someone tells you, “For the next minute, I want you to think of anything but pink elephants carrying polka-dot umbrellas,” you will have a difficult time not thinking of them. If that same person had mentioned pink elephants but then said, “Observe your thoughts and note where they go,” chances are you would still think about the elephants briefly, but then your mind would naturally wander on to other things. In a way, my efforts to not think about the crime were making it almost impossible for me to think about anything else.

  I was usually a very healthy person, but that semester it seemed as if I was attracting not only elephants, but germs, too. Fighting off colds, the flu, and other infections beat up my already weakened immune system. I’d taken the strong antiviral drugs for the first four weeks after the attack, and the side effects were brutal. I wondered if there had been some long-term effect that lingered, or if it was just that all the stress had finally caught up with me. If I wasn’t a runner, it might not have been so bad, but when you’re an athlete, you’re so attuned to how your body is doing that any alteration from prime operating condition sets off alarm bells.

  I tried to center my attention around my performance on the cross-country course. As a team, we’d finished the 2009 season ranked twenty-fifth in the nation. In the 2010 preseason, a track and cross-country coaches association had us ranked twenty-second nationally and number one in our region. I felt added pressure to lead the team as one of a few upperclassmen on the team. Neither Kristine nor Silje was competing that season. It seemed as if the injury and illness bug had gotten them. They both were unable to train well in the off-season and at the start of the regular season, so Coach Wollman decided it was best that they red-shirt—be withheld from competition for the season and preserve that time of NCAA eligibility until later. For cross-country season we traveled a lot, and the bus rides, flights, and hotel room stays were real opportunities to enjoy being with teammates. Without our two leaders, and with a lot of underclassmen on the team, I became a source of information for the other girls. I knew the courses; I knew the opposition. The night before meets we always had a team meeting. One night before a meet at the University of Texas at Arlington, Coach Casey asked if anyone had anything to say. I looked around the room and saw many of the girls looking my way. I never liked speaking publicly, but I knew that I had to say something. So I started talking about something that had been on my mind for a while. Track and cross-country are odd sports, I observed, because you are both competing with and against your teammates. In order for us to do well as a team we had to keep that in mind. Encouraging one another, helping one another, was hugely important. I told them, “We have to take responsibility for ourselves while still looking out for one another. Trust and support will make the difference.” I didn’t say this to them, but I was thinking about how so many people were contributing to my recovery, how much of the work was mine to do, but I wouldn’t have been able to do any of it without the advice and encouragement of others.

  A few weeks later, at a meet in South Bend, Indiana, hosted by the University of Notre Dame, we endured one of those miserably wet and rainy days that make cross-country a real test. The wind was blowing sideways, we were shivering and mud-covered, and we struggled as a team, finishing in twenty-third place, with our to
p runner coming in seventieth overall. Not a good day at all. After the race, we got together as a group for a long cool-down, laughing at the irony of the term, and I noticed that one of the girls, Caitlin, was crying as we ran. I got alongside her and asked what was wrong.

  “I don’t want to do this anymore. This is no fun.”

  I knew that she wasn’t talking about just that day and running in those conditions. We’d all underperformed, and Coach Casey had let us know that she wasn’t happy about it. I also saw some of myself in her, putting so much pressure on herself to always be the best and run her best every time out. She worked so hard, she didn’t deserve to feel bad.

  “Sometimes, you just have to not give a shit.”

  The rain eventually eroded the shocked look on Caitlin’s face. She started to smile and tilted her head up like a little girl and drank it in.

  She later told me how much that meant to her and how she’d learned a lot from me. I just wish that I had done a better job of taking my own advice.

  In October, SMU hosted a Take Back the Night event. I’d heard about the foundation that organizes these events, and has since the 1970s, but I’d never attended one before. Take Back the Night is a campaign to encourage women to be careful when they go out at night, to empower women to combat violence. The point of the rallies is to raise awareness about all kinds of sexual violence that occurs. Originally, the events were a way for women to show support for one another, but over the years the events have evolved to be more inclusive.

  I’d seen fliers announcing the candlelight vigil and parade posted around campus for a few weeks prior and planned to attend. At first I thought that I would go alone, but Kristine and Silje had also seen the announcements, and they wanted to go as a sign of support for me and for others who had suffered some form of sexual violence. As we walked on campus that night to the meeting place, I was surprised to see at least a hundred and maybe two hundred people there. The marchers were predominately women, but a few men were there as well. I had expected it to be a very somber event, but it actually felt more like a social occasion. The three of us stood and talked while we waited for a few of the organizers to hand out candles.