"I called my boyfriend and told him what had happened. I didn't tell him in person because we lived 1,000 miles apart and were rarely in the same room. The incident had involved a man riding his bike with his pants pulled down around his ass, hissing at me, "You want some of this?" It was quite a feat of balance, I thought in the split second before I realized he was a threat, stalking me in the black morning when I was just trying"
"When my boyfriend came to visit the following weekend, we ran together, and I felt safe again. He was tall and fit and never worried about being stalked. I hated that I felt safer with him just because he was a man while the source of my fear was also a man, how men had on-off power over my sense of security."
I called my boyfriend after a man on a bike exposed himself and hissed, "You want some of this?" The police took a report. The relationship began after a 19-year marriage ended, and I had opened up about my life and needs. I refused to stop running at night, but shadows from my headlamp made me imagine the man everywhere. When my boyfriend visited I felt safe running with him, resenting that his maleness controlled my security. After he left, the man reappeared, rode past and U-turned to stare into my kitchen. Police searched and I finally saw him: hooded eyes, black hair, skin drawn tight around his jaw.
Read at BuzzFeed
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