In the Woods When First We Met

1. Prologue

As I begin, I'd like to explain why I wrote this story. Especially since it is a tough subject.

When I saw the episode of "Anne With an E" in which Billy waits in the woods for Anne, I flashed back to an incident that happened to me...something bad happened to me in the woods near my school and when you read this story you'll know what.

The episode really hit me because it was the same exact situation- me seeing a girl doing something, mentioning it to someone, it being spread around, and her brother deciding to deal with it. In the woods outside of our school. The same situation as in the show.

So that episode of the tv show really hit me hard.

I got the exact same "vibe" from Billy in that scene that I got from my real life attacker...I don't believe Billy was just there to beat her up.

Gilbert was there to step in and help. No one was there to help me.

Anne is my heroine in every way, and even though this story is sad, it helps to imagine how Anne would have been in MY situation, how strong she was, how her imagination and her hope got her through it.

At first, I only wrote the story to be about the aftermath- how Anne heals herself- but NOT about the actual incident itself. I did not want to actually write the assault scene. The reason I finally DID write about the incident itself is that I had NEVER talked to ANYONE about what happened to me. EVER. When I wrote this scene, I was picturing myself and what happened to ME, not picturing Anne. But the thing is, once I wrote down what happened to me as if it had happened to this fictional character instead, I was able to read what happened from an outsider perspective, and see that there was really no justification for this being done to someone.

And it sounds weird I guess but thinking of my heroine in the same situation as me and figuring out how to write her out of it, getting my heroine through the bad things that happened to me, made me feel better about it- or at least not alone.

What I went through changed me in ways I never imagined, and I went a while just pushing what happened to me into the back of my mind and never facing it, never actually getting through it.

THEN, during an episode of Anne, everything just flooded back to me in an instant and I decided I needed to to use that moment to push myself to re-live everything in an attempt to gain some control and perspective.

It helped me, but..why put it up on a website, though? I decided to put the story up on a website because I want to say that if this happened to you, too, like me, all of the feelings portrayed in this story are normal feelings and, just like Anne, you will survive...and even thrive. : )