police. But I believed I could do something about this on my own. To understand why, you would need to know what makes me different from the general population. You would have to understand what brought me to North Carolina in the first place. No, I’m not an assassin who spent her childhood being groomed by monks in the art of ancient jiu jitsu.
As a matter of fact, even if my life depended on it, I’d be hard pressed to do a chin-up. I’m about as graceful as a seasick flamingo. My overall endurance makes me pretty sure I’m one of those people who is thin on the outside and fat on the inside. I don’t have a weapon, I don’t have any allies, and I don’t really have a plan.
I have no particularly impressive skills besides perhaps valuing my own life so little that I’m willing to risk it even when the odds are stacked against me. I’m delusional and I’m damaged, but I’m brave. That’s really all I have right now.
So how did I get here, how did I get to a point where I thought I could take justice into my own hands? I arrived in North Carolina two years before I had witnessed the judge’s assault. The life that lay before me was blank. I was given a clean slate; clean to a degree that many people would envy considering the circumstances that led me there. Yet to me, the void stretching before me was suffocating rather than liberating. I was adrift in a new town, a new world. I was twenty-three years old and essentially born again, burdened with the ignorance of a child and the expectations of an adult.
My “relocation,” as I have come to internally label it, had afforded me a small place to live. It was paid outright, and it was mine. I had a sum of money that, in my naïve, unworldly experience, seemed like a small fortune. In truth, it was just enough to be swallowed up by the reality of existing on my own. As it turns out, barricading myself in my townhouse and ordering delivery pizza couldn’t be a long-term solution. It was as bad for my mental health as it was for my desire to fit into my skinny jeans.
I was the warden in my own prison. That realization hit me on a Tuesday and by the following Monday, I had enrolled in college. It was something I had never allowed myself to consider in the past. I was breaking free of the chains, and embracing my new life.
It made perfect sense to me that I should major in criminal justice. I had the unfortunate experience of seeing the system up close and personal from a very young age. The first year was thrilling in its fairy-tale-like explanation of our justice system. I was slightly older than many of the other students who were fresh out of high school, but no one seemed to notice. The excitement of the large lecture halls with stadium seating like I had seen on television made muddling through my general requirement courses a little more bearable. It was text books and study groups. It was me practicing my new life, my new name.
Because I had more time than the average student I enrolled in a few classes that would have normally been reserved for the following year. I was completely captivated by the curriculum in my criminal profiling and theories of crime classes.
The philosophies I learned were idealistic and stirred something within me. I had a newfound feeling of empowerment and pride. My entire life had been so turbulent, such a mess, but now here I was in college dreaming of something better. It seems ridiculous looking back on it now, but I believed I could change the world. Maybe I couldn’t do anything about my own past, but someone else’s future could be shaped by my actions, my hardline belief in the system.
During my second year it was time to plot out the direction of my career. How would I apply this degree? So I went out into the world. I ventured into the streets of this new town I had been dropped in—Edenville, North Carolina. Its population was just over fifteen thousand, but it had pockets of small town charm, and I lived right in the middle of one of those communities. This place was so different than the world in which I had grown up. There were times