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| Daniel Bedell for ESPN the Magazine |
It's been just six months since President Barack Obama granted her clemency and released her from federal prison 15 years into a 20-year drug sentence. It's been 10 weeks since she left a halfway house and moved back home; eight weeks since she bought her first cellphone; five weeks since she learned to drive again; and four weeks since she met some of her nieces and nephews for the first time. It's been two days since her most recent panic attack, which she spent holed up in her bedroom, overwhelmed by the freedoms and stresses of the outside world.
"I'm like a child," she tells Demaryius during a phone call. "I have to relearn everything. It's information overload, and my head is about to explode."
Her transition back into society has had its stressful moments, but never more so than this week. Relatives call for Super Bowl tickets. Strangers on the Internet complain to her about Demaryius' dropped passes. Her parole officer says she needs to find a job, enroll in college, submit to another drug test and fill out paperwork if she wants to travel to the Super Bowl in San Francisco. He has questions about her potential itinerary, and Katina has questions, too -- all of which she asks Demaryius each morning during their daily calls.
"How big is the stadium?" "How will I get there?" "What do people wear in San Francisco?" "Am I ready to make a trip like this?"
She spent 15 years cut off from America in a 20-by-20-foot concrete cell, and now she has an invitation to the biggest American spectacle of all.
A series of counselors and former inmates had told her to take it slow in the months after her release, to transition gradually: a first-generation cellphone before a smartphone; email before Facebook; short outings to familiar places before any ambitious trips. She moved back to the quiet of rural Dublin, Georgia, even though she would prefer living in Atlanta. She stays with her sister even as Demaryius finalizes the purchase on her own five-bedroom dream house. He bought her a brand-new Camaro with the nicest trims, but first she had to retake the state driving test and figure out how to work a stereo system that was missing its tape deck.
She already took one trip to a divisional playoff game in Denver in the middle of January -- the best weekend of her life, she says -- but the fatigue that followed left her with a headache that lasted a week. She came home, turned off her phone, closed the door to her bedroom and read the same Bible verses about humility and simplicity that she studied each morning in prison. She finds relief in routine, in being momentarily confined. Sometimes she rereads the letter Obama sent to her along with her official notice of clemency from the White House. "Perhaps even you are unsure of how you will adjust," he had written.
A few days before her release from prison, a counselor had talked to her about situations that could trigger anxiety: unfamiliar places, disorientation, strangers, big crowds, loud noises and sudden excitement.
She wonders: How in the world can she go to the Super Bowl?
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