By Amanda Knox

A memory can be visceral. It can feel heavy, like the lead capes dentists drape over you when they’re taking X-rays. It can make your tongue feel thick and pasty, like you could choke on it. It can make your neck feel constricted, like you’re drowning. It can feel like a thunderstorm in your brain—sluggish and angry cumulonimbus dragging through each other, lightning striking.

That’s how I feel. On the first anniversary of my definitive acquittal, what first comes to mind isn’t the moment of watching the tiny live-streaming window on my laptop and hearing the incredulous correspondent report the good news from immediately outside the Italian Supreme Court. It isn’t the way my family and friends cried out in relief and surprise and joy for the end of persecution, the end of pain.
What comes to mind, instead, is the memory of one of my cellmates, we’ll call her Bernadette, sitting on her bunk across from me, tearing out page after page of my journal and shredding them, until there was nothing left.

Bernadette, who spent most of her time in a depressant-induced half-sleep, had convinced herself that I had been observing her movements and was writing them down for some nefarious purpose, like snitching maybe. I tried, and failed, to reason with her, but she had made up her mind and all I could do was sit there, struck dumb, numb.

I didn’t have much, but I had that journal. Because I have a terrible memory, my journal was where I documented the memories I wanted to keep. Because I best access my thoughts by writing them down, my journal was where my mental processing coalesced. My journal was an extension of myself, like so much that had already been taken away from me—my family, my friends, my future.

Curious, the way your brain can draw connections unconsciously. Bernadette’s action felt very much like what I experienced at the hands of the justice system. My journal was my freedom. Bernadette—well, Bernadette herself wasn’t necessarily bad. She was just wrong. Motivated by self-preservation and paranoia, she punished, she destroyed, all for nothing.

Curious, that I remain so immediately sensitive to that feeling of subjugation. I had thought that, with the anniversary happening to land on Easter—when my family gathers together to drink mimosas, snarf down fried potato hash and fruit salad with baked coconut shavings, and hunt for eggs in the backyard—, I would feel joy, I would feel grounded in a celebratory memory. Then again, is it really a surprise that, with only a year between me and an extended period of my life when self-determination was almost utterly denied me, I find that when I check in and think about it, I’m still processing the raw facts and the raw feelings of what happened?

At the same time, this sensitivity is not a feeling I would throw away. I do hope and work to feel peace, a wearing down of that jagged edge, a healing of the wound. But I can also celebrate, if not in the sense of joy then in the sense of acknowledgement, because sensitivity informs and hones my concern with the selfhood of myself and others. I feel peace—and joy!—at the being of human beings, at our intelligence and individuality, at our belonging absolutely and utterly to ourselves in all the ways that can never be ripped apart and taken away. The self remains, and even when the words are gone, this visceral weight means the body never forgets.