When I was deciding whether to attend the trial of the man who raped and murdered my cousin Sabina, I felt like I should go so that the jury would see me there. I knew how easy it would be for her to become an abstraction to them...to us-to me and my aunt and my mother and the rest of our family and her friends-she was still Sabina, still a real girl who we would never see or hug or dance with again. If we were all there, sitting on the bench behind the prosecutor, I thought, maybe the jury would be able to see that there was a real person missing.
I also thought I should go to the trial because I might want to write about it someday. I had already learned, at 23, that the page is the safest place for me to try to make sense of things that feel senseless. Telling myself I would write about what happened to Sabina someday meant I didn't have to fully face the horror of it just yet...the trial would be an important part of the story I would tell.
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