Kill the Silence

by Monika Korra

  “I forgive you. You still have a lot of your life left.”

  As I spoke those words, my heart felt lighter. It wasn’t as if my forgiving him made a difference in terms of how God would judge him or anything like that, but I did feel that I would be carrying around a burden for the rest of my life if I remained angry. I’d begun to let go of the fear when they were arrested and convicted, and that offered me some comfort; if I hadn’t been able to forgive Luis and to see how he seemed genuinely grateful, if I lumped him together with the other two as bad men undeserving of compassion or consideration as individuals, then justice really wouldn’t be done.

  Luis Zuniga was a criminal and a rapist, but his actions after he was apprehended had shown me that he was deserving of forgiveness, that if he hadn’t admitted his guilt and asked for forgiveness and wished me well, then I wouldn’t have given him the kind of careful thought I did. I knew that. When he had pushed me out of that SUV, I had felt like I’d been given a second chance, that somehow God had intervened on my behalf that night, and it seemed reasonable then that I do something that could offer this man some hope for change. All our lives had been altered by the events of December 5, 2009, and I was in the process of making my life better than it had been. I wanted to offer to someone else the chance that I had been offered. What he did with that opportunity was more important now than those past actions, just as what I did with the challenges I faced was more important than that night.

  Though we don’t have an exact equivalent of the term “underdog” in Norwegian, I was familiar with, and a great believer in, the concept. I always liked stories of people who came back from their struggles, who defied the odds, who triumphed in spite of many forces working against them. I wasn’t certain that Luis Zuniga’s story would end triumphantly, but I at least wanted to be certain that he’d have the opportunity to try to win. I couldn’t imagine what it was like to be held in an American prison. I knew a little of how this system differed from ours in Norway, so I had a feeling that Luis Zuniga was going to face many challenges. I didn’t feel guilty about that, but I did hope that he meant what he had said about making changes to his life.

  With the legal proceedings involving the three men over, I knew that change was possible for me. I felt it instantly. In the wake of the attack, I’d activated a kind of autopilot mechanism. I knew that the pre-rape Monika was a serious student, so I studied like crazy. I was maniacally dedicated to my sport, so that’s what I kept doing. I did question that part of my life, but only because my efforts and my results were too frequently a mismatch.

  After the Zuniga hearing, I had more time to reflect on how I’d been forced into those patterns of behavior. It took a few days for it to sink in that I wouldn’t be appearing in court anymore. This had been like being in a marathon or other long race. Someone once told me that a marathon can’t fit inside your head. What that meant was that 26.2 miles was such a long distance that if you started to think about mile 25 and 26 early in the race, you’d never get to those last miles. You’d be so bogged down and plagued by doubts and uncertainties that you couldn’t do it. You had to break the race down into smaller increments. I’d been doing that all along as the legal system did its thing.

  The adrenaline rush of being done with the court system was fun but short-lived. Immediately after the hearing Brandon had hugged me and said, “This is it.”

  “It is,” I said.

  At that moment, I felt like I could have gone out and run that marathon, and it would have fit in my head. A couple of days after, however, I realized how tired I was, mentally and emotionally primarily, but physically, too. Talking with Kristine and Silje helped. They both pointed out just how much had happened between that night in 2009 and the spring of 2011. We’d crammed a marathon-distance set of experiences into a 10K race. “Slow down” was the message I was getting.

  For me, that didn’t mean stopping completely, but thinking things through with more precision, less hurry-up, and getting real control over the mental game. Nick was helpful with this. After I returned to Dallas in the fall of 2011, we started dating. The physical attraction had been there from the start, but I didn’t have space for him as a boyfriend in that life. In my new one, I did. Talking with him helped me sort through the collection of feelings and desires I had.

  As much as I didn’t want the attack to take over my life and my future, my sense that I could, and wanted to, help others took a stronger hold over me. In a way it worked like this: I had suffered a great deal of pain. In order to truly heal from that, in order for that pain to turn into some kind of gain, I had to do something that extended beyond my own personal needs and desires. Many other lives had been affected by what happened that night. If you placed all that pain, suffering, and worry on a scale, you’d find yourself in need of a whole lot of hope, change, and positivity to even out the scale. But I wanted more than that; I wanted that pain to be catapulted out of the lives of everyone else who had suffered any kind of tragedy.

  From the very first days when I thought about coming forward, a phrase had kept running through my mind: “Kill the silence.” I knew that by keeping quiet for as long as I had, I’d given the pain and the suffering a bit of a head start. I was confident that I could catch up and outrace it to the finish line. I’d been silent for far too long, and I knew that it was the silence that prolonged the pain for many rape victims; it was a silence whose source was shame and humiliation, a severe form of the desire to be treated as “normal,” to not be looked on with pity or, in some cases, blame.

  I shared these thoughts with Nick, and the business guy that he was, he suggested that we come up with a plan to make my vision a reality. Over time, he’d help do just that.

  In the meantime, I had races to run and personal records to better.

  Before it began, Silje, Kristine, and I talked about our goals for the upcoming cross-country season. We’d won our conference title in 2009 and then finished a very disappointing fifth in 2010.

  “We know what we have to do,” Silje said.

  “Nothing short of that will make me happy,” Kristine added.

  “I’m in,” I said. I thought about how proud I was of what we’d accomplished in 2009, how much the watch that we’d been presented as champions meant to me—and how devastating it had felt when the men who raped me stole that watch from me, as well. I knew that I’d never get it back, just as I’d never get back all the time that had been taken up by the men who had robbed me of it and so much more. But winning could make me forget a lot of things.

  As team veterans, we set the tone in the first meet of the year. We weren’t going to be messed with. Silje, Kristine, and I finished first, third, and fifth respectively in our season-opening meet. But as the saying goes, it’s not how you start but how you finish. We were pointing toward the conference championship and the NCAA Championships after that. We weren’t going to let anything get in our way. We won again at our second meet, with Silje once again leading the way. She’d go on to win four meets in a row, including a first place at the prestigious Chile Pepper Cross-Country Festival in Arkansas on October 15. I had a top-fifty finish in a field of nearly three hundred, and I was pleased that I was contributing and doing well against such strong fields.

  When I was a kid, I hadn’t heard of Halloween. At SMU, it was a big deal, and by 2011, it had also caught on in Norway. For the three of us, though, Halloween wasn’t about tricks or treats; it was all about getting our jobs done and completing our mission. We traveled to Houston for the Conference USA Championships at Rice University. We were focused on Tulsa’s Golden Hurricanes, who had dethroned us in 2010.

  Under normal circumstances, I probably wouldn’t have even stepped up to the start line. I had come down with some kind of upper respiratory infection that was so bad that I spent the whole week before the race in bed. I was febrile and my joints ached. But I knew that if I could get out of bed, I was going to race. This was the last chance for the three of us to race toget
her as college teammates, and nothing was going to get in the way of me being with the two of them. As the week progressed, I started to feel better, but I was glad that I was so practiced in telling everyone, and myself, that I was okay.

  As the starting gun went off, and as much as I was focused on just doing my best, I have to admit that I was keeping my eyes out for Tulsa’s white-and-blue uniforms. By the time we reached the two-kilometer mark of the five-kilometer race, the leaders were a thin line trailing a balloon of runners. I focused on the ground ahead of me and on my arm swing, glancing side to side to see who was near me. I knew that Silje was likely near the lead and Kristine likely among that small group at the front. Scoring works like this: You take the finish place of each of your top five runners and add them up. Lowest team total wins the team conference championship.

  I had to finish as high as I possibly could. I worked my way up to the top of the balloon as we passed the 3K point, and maybe two dozen runners were ahead of me. I tried to count the jerseys, but with the rolling hills it was tough to be sure. I thought I saw two SMU girls, but a number of other teams were wearing white singlets like the Tulsa girls.

  I picked up my pace and told myself to forget trying to count. Just put all your effort into this, I thought, and maybe nearer the finish, you’ll have a better sense of where you stand. As the finish line came into view, with about four hundred meters to go, I took a glance around me. No more than a dozen or so runners were ahead of me, and I saw that two white singlets with Tulsa emblazoned on them were behind me. I dug deep, determined that no one would get by me at the end, especially those two Tulsa runners.

  There are times when you run and you feel everything—the strike of your foot on the ground, your hair whipping you, the flesh of your inner arms and armpits rubbing. But in that last four hundred, I was disembodied. I felt nothing. All I saw was that banner marking the finish. I felt as if I were floating, not the slow-motion Chariots of Fire kind of floating, but a sense of my head being disconnected from my body and moving at good speed. I crossed the line, and like a puppet with its wires clipped, I wobbled, let my arms dangle, and then sank to the ground off to the side and meters away from the other runners finishing.

  I looked at the clock, and it clicked over to eighteen minutes exactly. I didn’t know exactly how long I’d flailed and then tried to catch my breath, but I was pleased with my effort. No one had passed me at the end. I hadn’t run a PR, but that didn’t matter. I was still not feeling 100 percent, but I’d gutted it out and helped earn the team some points—that was what really mattered.

  I found my teammates, the two veteran Norwegian girls, and Mary Alenbratt, our Swedish little sister, and we all threw our arms around one another. A moment later, Kasja Barr, a freshman and another part of the team’s Swedish connection, joined us. I looked around at these strong, proud women, our faces a portrait of joy and effort, and let out a huge whooping scream that backed the other girls away from me for a moment before we all collapsed into a pile of exhausted pups.

  It took a few minutes for the rest of the finishers to cross the line, but we knew that Silje had led the way again by winning the meet and setting a record. Kristine came in seventh, Mary twelfth, and me in fourteenth place. Kasja finished in twenty-third, giving us a team total of 57. The lowest score would win. We held our breath until Tulsa’s score was posted—59!

  We’d done it. Once again we all gathered around one another, all five of us whose times had counted and the other four who’d run, along with Coach Casey and other staff. We circled arms and danced as we chanted, “S to the M, M to the U, SMU, SMU—Goooo Mustangs!” I was so choked up with pride and sadness that it was over that I could barely get the words out.

  I was so happy that we’d gotten back to the place we’d been in 2009, back to the place I was at just before the attack. I’d spent two long years trying to return to normal, and for me, that meant winning, giving my all, and being surrounded by a group of incredibly talented and hardworking teammates and coaches.

  After we had done our cool-down, we put our blue-and-white SMU jackets on and got ready for the prize ceremony. I walked up to receive a watch commemorating our conference championship. As I stood there with the rest of the girls, I only flashed back briefly to the watch I’d received at a similar ceremony following the 2009 season. This one couldn’t replace the watch that had been taken from me that night, and I was okay with that. I’d come to understand that none of us ever get back to exactly the point we were before in our lives, that life is one incredible ride, always moving forward no matter what else is happening.

  Later that evening, as the three of us sat around the apartment talking about finals and plans for the holidays, I grew reflective. I sat there looking at my watch and couldn’t suppress a grin. How funny it was that we were given timepieces to commemorate a conference win. As runners we’re so obsessed with time. This was almost like giving an alcoholic a bottle of champagne to celebrate a year of sobriety. I had spent so much of the last several months wishing that time would fly by so that I could get beyond the trials and heal mentally and emotionally. Now I realized that the season and the semester had flown by. For the first time in a while, I caught myself wishing that things would slow down, that everything would stop moving and spinning so quickly. I wanted to savor this moment with my friends, hold these feelings close to me as a comfort and a reminder. I sat there as the second hand swept around the dial of my new watch, turning circles, marking steady progress, always forward in tiny but meaningful increments.

  Though I didn’t need to receive more tangible proof that I had made great strides that season, I got it. At the end of the fall sports season, all the athletes at SMU gathered together for an awards and recognition banquet. All the girls got dressed up, and we sat at tables grouped together by sport. We all felt so glamorous and giddy, like we were at the Golden Globe Awards in Hollywood, celebrating our individual and collective achievement. With so many sports represented, the evening did drag on a bit.

  My thoughts also drifted a bit. The next thing I knew, Kristine was shaking my arm.

  “Go up there.”

  I looked at her. “What?”

  Kristine screwed her face up in disbelief. “Go up there. You won.”

  I still sat rooted in my seat. All around me, I saw everyone else standing.

  Kristine stood and lifted me up by the elbow.

  “Go,” she said again. “Shoo!” She burst into laughter, and I finally made my first tentative steps toward the stage.

  On a projection screen behind the dais, I read “Perseverance Award 2010–2011.”

  I stepped onto the stage, and the sound of everyone’s applause finally cut through the fog. The athletic director held out the plaque to me, and I took it. Feeling its heft in my arms, and seeing everyone standing and applauding, filled my heart. I didn’t care that everyone knew the reason why I had to persevere. What mattered was that I had.

  I still had the 2012 track indoor and outdoor seasons to look forward to, and then graduation. It’s funny that my being sick just before the conference championship and then persevering through it had helped me better come to grips with my running. I didn’t slack off on my training and I didn’t give any less effort in the races, but I saw things from a different perspective. These were going to be my last months competing on the collegiate level. I’d helped the team win a championship and that was incredibly fulfilling. I hadn’t gone into that race with huge expectations or a focus on running a PR. I just wanted to do my best, and to help the team win, and enjoy the experience.

  That was a revelation to me: Enjoy the experience of running again. I know that this is hard to make clear, but I loved running. I didn’t always enjoy the results; in fact, I too often agonized over them. Heading into the spring 2012 indoor season, I was coming off some of the hardest training I’d done. My results hadn’t shown it, but I was trying to shrug that off. It didn’t make sense to me that effort wasn’t equaling result
s, but maybe if I stopped thinking about those PRs, then some good would come my way.

  On January 27, 2012, I lay in the infield stretching prior to my race. Kristine was alongside me. She must have picked up on my mood.

  “Monika, you’re better than you think you are,” Kristine told me. “You can do this. Just relax.”

  While I waited for the race to start, I listened to Florence and the Machine’s song “Shake It Out” on repeat. One line hit home harder than the rest: “It’s hard to dance with a devil on your back.”

  That was my answer to why training hadn’t produced the results I thought I’d earned. How was I supposed to enjoy myself when I was carrying around all this pressure?

  I have to let this go, I told myself. It wasn’t fair to use my racing as a barometer of my healing. I finally had my epiphany: How fast I ran had nothing to do with whether or not I was going to live as a victim for the rest of my life, and no one but me had ever seen it that way. I was imagining that other people looked at my race results as proof that I was a damaged person. But all along, it was me causing the pressure. It was my fault that I wasn’t racing at my best anymore. And that got me mad. I had expended so much energy on fighting for my mental health that I hadn’t had anything left for the fight to race just for the sake of running again.

  In that moment, inside the Randal Tyson Track Center at the University of Arkansas, I changed my outlook. I had been thinking about trying to reconnect with the joy of running. Now I was going to do something to allow that to happen. I was going to run this race without staring at the seconds ticking by, without making mental calculations about where I was and where I should be, and without being angry with myself about my shortcomings. Before the race started, I did something I’d never done before: I took off my watch.

  I took a deep breath, got into position, and when the starting gun fired, I took off. In seconds, I was enveloped in chaos, a tangle of arms, legs, and torsos. I fought off a brief flash of panic. I didn’t want to fall too far behind.