"More than a stunning debut. It is the announcement of a bold new literary voice"
—Stephen Chbosky, author of The Perks of Being a Wallflower

I learnt that wasn’t your real name after I watched the reconstruction of your sad story, and it kind of disappointed me, and I’ll tell you why. The last four years of your life you suffered, you suffered so tremendously and withstood so much, that I felt as if it were a little unfair that no one would get to know who the real you was.

Because you were normal, you were an everyday person who wasn’t a celebrity or in the public eye, you were a normal person with a normal life who got the worst luck, as most people do, and you soldiered through it in such a way that I felt like you DESERVED the recognition that some many celebrities do.

Ashley, you found something that a lot of girls dreamed of finding when you were 17, you found love; and for a while it was perfect, and he treated you like a princess, and he adored you, and you fell so deeply that flaws didn’t even matter anymore. Sometimes, that love turns ugly, it turns into something cruel and suffocating, and many criticized you for not getting out, some said that you should have been strong and gotten out of something so abusive, but I think you were strong for staying.

There’s a quote that Maya Angelou once said; “have enough courage to trust love one more time, and always one more time.” And I think that’s what you did, you kept trusting, and hoping, and believing that there was still something good. For that, you were brave.

Because I guess there’s something about falling in love, I think it’s like the classic trust exercise. Only on a more elaborate scale, you’re trusting that when you fall, feeling your body near the floor, that you didn’t make a mistake and land badly, and hurt yourself. You’re trusting that the person you’ve chosen to stand behind you will put their arms out, catching you and encasing you within their grip and saving you. You’re trusting that they’re always going to do that, that there’s not an inch of doubt in your mind. That’s a terrifying thing to do.

Don’t get me wrong, you should have walked away, you should have realised that the way he hurt you wasn’t love at all. It was just his sick twisted and misinformed conception of what love was, you should have known. But I don’t think you’re coward for it.

You had more than just yourself to think about after that, you had a little girl, and the image she had created of her father was something so incredibly different than to what he really was. Sometimes I think that maybe, when you did consider leaving him you thought of your daughter, of how she looked at her Dad like you had once looked at him, and how he looked at her made it seem like there was no bad in him. I think maybe, you stayed because you didn’t want to tarnish the image and memories your daughter had of him, you didn’t want to ruin something so innocent with hurt and chaos.

But in the end, that never happened. Because she did have her memories tarnished, because the happy moments she had colouring pictures with her Dad in the day, couldn’t drown out your screaming as his fist beat upon you late at night. And it makes me sad, it makes me sad because somewhere in the back of her mind she’ll learn to believe that violence is a form of love, that hurt is the only way to feel love, and the cycle of your sad story will continue.

Sometimes I think I may have understood how you felt, not in the sense that of what you went through in a violent relationship, but of how you felt like you spent all day screaming with no one to hear you. How you felt suffocated and locked up, and alone and desperate to be wanted and accepted, I think everyone feels that, and I think not all people find it.

That’s when I started to realise; it didn’t matter if I knew your name, it didn’t matter if the real you wasn’t acknowledged for what she went through. What mattered was that you were here, Ashley, you were alive, you had a story and it was heard. That your story was here, and told and as raw as life can get, that it was reality. That not all lives have happy endings, that not all people climb out of that dark hole and move towards a brighter day. Your story proved that bad things happen to people every day, but that it’s not insignificant in anyway, I think your tragic story woke many up, it woke them up to your suffering, and it woke them up to life.

I think sometimes people need a brutal brush with reality, I think they need to see something that deep and cruel from an outside perspective. I think it’s what makes people not take life for granted, or the love they have for granted. The pure love that has no violence and pain, the kind of love that you don’t realise is so incredibly precious.

I wish your story didn’t have to end the way it did in order for that message to be noticed, I wish that you believing in love over and over again had turned out the way you dreamed it would.

What I’m trying to say Ashley is this; you’re not a faceless story, you won’t be forgotten by the world. You were here and you were heard, you were loved and you were lost.

You will be remembered.