Paint and Pages

Content note: this letter discusses violence, a fatal shooting, and trauma responses.

This writing is offered as collective witness. It is not addressed to any specific individual, and no response is expected. If you are the person described here and encounter this unexpectedly, you owe no one anything. Not even reading this letter to the end.

I’m sharing this because public violence flattens people into roles. This is an attempt to remember that she was helping too, and to make clear that responsibility belongs with those who chose violence.

An Open Letter to the Woman Alex Pretti Helped:

I do not know you, but I saw you.

You were doing something brave.

You were standing there, keeping more than the recommended eight feet, holding a phone, doing the small and dangerous work of paying attention.

You were witnessing. You were making a record. A constitutional observer.

Many of us who live and work in Minnesota attended trainings recently on how to do this. We learned to keep at least eight feet of distance while recording. You did.

You were doing what free people do when they see something wrong.

Thank you.

Then we saw you pushed to the ground by federal agents.

Survivors recognize that moment instantly. One second you are upright, oriented, alive in your body. The next, you are disoriented on the ground. The wind is gone from your lungs. Your nervous system takes over. Your body understands before your mind can catch up.

This is what violence feels like.

This violence did not happen in isolation. It often does not.

This violence happened in Minneapolis, a city already reeling from authoritarian force. Violence that had already taken lives, including Rene Good, a mother dropping her child off at school on January 7th. A woman who should have gone on with her day and picked up her son. A woman who did nothing extraordinary that day and told a man she was not mad at him.

A mother whose life was taken because someone decided he wanted to kill her.

That same kind of violent decision-making that left Alex Pretti dead.

It is not your fault that Alex Pretti stepped in to help you.

A man saw violence and chose decency. He stepped forward. He put his body between harm and another human being. That choice belonged to him, and it speaks to who he was.

It is not your fault that he was struck.

It is not your fault that he was pushed.

It is not your fault that he was thrown to the ground.

It is not your fault that his hand went up and was ignored.

It is not your fault that he was shot multiple times.

It is not your fault that he died.

I do not know if the scream in the video was yours. If it was, that is okay. If it was not, that is okay too.

That scream was a sound deeper than language. It carried shock, horror, and the sudden understanding that something irreversible had happened. It is the sound humans make when the man who just helped you is now lying dead in the snow.

It is not your fault.

He was a giver who helped others as a profession. He helped veterans in a hospital. He helped women pushed to the ground in the street.

It is not your fault that lies tried to rewrite the narrative of Alex Pretti.

It is not your fault that people tried to say he was a domestic terrorist.

It is not your fault that they said he was armed.

It is not your fault that the truth was inconvenient to a false narrative designed to justify violence.

It is not your fault that his parents now carry the unbearable work of grieving their son while also telling the world who he actually was.

A good man.

A nurse.

Someone who cared for veterans.

Someone who helped our nation’s heroes live their last moments peacefully.

Someone whose last act was helping a woman who had just been hurt.

His words to you were, “Are you okay?”

We know so much about who Alex Pretti was.

We saw the video of his farewell to a veteran patient.

We saw the photos of him in scrubs and hiking in the woods.

We heard from the people who taught him and loved him.

We saw his eyes and his bearded smile.

We now know there are good men.

We now know they still exist.

We now know what it looks like when one of them behaves decently.

We want to remember the man who helped.

It also matters to remember that there was a woman he helped.

Seeing you both matters.

How you helped.

How he helped.

Asking, “Are you okay?”

I wonder:

Were you a giver too?

Did you have a job helping others in ways no one ever sees?

Did you like hiking in the woods, walking your block, and caring for those who depend on you?

Who was lucky enough to call you their neighbor? You were the kind of neighbor who looked out for your neighbor. What books do you read? What songs do you listen to that keep your heart beating and kind?

You do not owe anyone answers to these questions.

They are not demands.

They are just a refusal to let you be flattened into a moment, or a blur in a video, or a woman harmed.

Did you write poetry? Make snicker-salad? Call it Duck-duck-gray-duck and tater tot hot dish?

You were already someone before that day.

You are still someone now.

You are a human, helping and receiving help.

Helping women who have been harmed should not cost men anything. It does. That is how patriarchy works.

Alex Pretti paid the ultimate price with his life. That should not have happened. That is not your fault.

Many of us are grieving. Many of us are horrified. And many of us are thinking about you.

We are wondering, what Alex Pretti wondered: are you okay?

We understand if you are not.

We understand if you are.

We understand if you do not know.

We understand if you are okay now and tomorrow it hits you and you are not okay for a while.

If you find bruises you didn’t know you had.

If you become stiff and sore in a couple of days.

If you have moments where you feel a million miles away from everyone around you.

We understand.

We hope you are surrounded by gentleness.

We hope you can find stillness and calm.

We hope you are sleeping when you can.

We hope you know that what you were doing mattered. That standing there, filming, refusing to look away, was not nothing. It was citizenship. It was conscience.

We hope you know it is okay to not be okay.

It is okay to flinch when you see reminders.

It is okay to feel uneasy around uniformed men.

It is okay to tense at the sight of a phone recording.

It is okay to lose sleep.

It is okay to leave town.

It is okay to share, not share, or overshare.

It is okay if your life permanently feels divided into before and after.

You’re not broken.

It is okay.

Wherever you are on that timeline, it is acceptable. It is human.

You are loved.

You matter.

And none of this was your fault.