Four years ago, I found myself in the uncanny valley of existential dread: sitting on the floor of an abandoned public bathroom in a bar in Boston, crying, as election results were confirmed. The halls were lined with blue and silver balloons, a site that was to be a celebration of a Trump loss. Instead, patrons went home, presumably in disbelief and a little bit of shame, and instead it was just me and a handful of my friends and acquaintences who had been playing a gig, just a few blocks away.
I ruined everyone’s night, sobbing from bar to bar, bathroom to bathroom, even on the band tour bus. People comforted me; I just shook my head and said, “You don’t understand.”
And they didn’t, because I wasn’t crying about politics. I was crying about justice, and I was thinking about you, Peter, a few blocks down the road, at home watching the election, feeling (maybe) smug, emboldened, watching a well-documented predator rise to the highest office in the land.
It had only been about 16 days since you assaulted me in your apartment, and 15 days since you reached out and texted me that you were “sorry things got out of hand” while I was lecturing my Introduction to Statistics class. When your name illuminated my phone, the patch on the back of my skull that was bald now, where you stole a clump of my hair, throbbed, and a strange, slithering sickness climbed up my body right underneath my skin, and I said, aloud, “Excuse me just a second” and I took my phone, left the room, and sat in a crowded student bathroom, until I finally texted, “NP” back, and then blocked your number.
It wasn’t really an apology, was it, Peter? It was damage control: strategic, a paper trail to serve as documentation that you hadn’t meant to hit my jaw so hard, hadn’t meant to drag me by the hair, hadn’t intended to me to rush out of your apartment with a single shoe and without my favorite jacket. It was all, as you desperately wanted to convince me and an imaginary jury and God, just a misunderstanding that got “a little out of hand.”
There was something that switched inside me on the floor of that Boston bar bathroom on election night four years ago. My guilt about not reporting, not going to the ER, disclosing to no one, completely disappeared.
Because I was right.
When I got to my car the night after fleeing your apartment, I white-knuckled the steering wheel wondering where to go, and I walked myself through what would happen at the ER. They would try to collect evidence; my cheek might still be red enough to look struck, and surely they would document the tiny spot that felt like a goddamn moon on my skull where my hair was torn. But there would be no fluids, no tears, no defensive injuries. I escaped too early.
And then an officer would arrive, and he would ask me about our relationship, and I would tell him that yes, we were on a date, and yes, I went voluntarily, and yes, I’d had a glass of wine at dinner and yes yes yes to all these things except you assaulting me and I knew, that that long string of hopeful, trusting yes’s would mean that my No would never hold up in court.
So I didn’t go there; I drove to a friends house, and I told him what happened, and he, after a sigh, looked at me and said: “I don’t know why you get yourself into these situations.”
And still, it wasn’t until election night, watching a predator rise to the highest ranks of our democracy, that I knew all of that doubt that justice was possible was justified, and I had, indeed, protected myself from a system that would have ripped me into pieces too small to ever be put together again.
And with that newfound knowledge came a new kind of justice, one that was achievable and possible and exists solely inside my soul, to keep me together.
And here we are, Peter. Peter H.
I imagine there was a period of time, a few days or weeks maybe, where you knew in your soul that you should be afraid: that maybe I would report you, or show up at your house for vengeance. And then maybe over time you read a story here or there about the value of forgivness and moving on and it comforted you, imagining that I, too, had moved on, maybe even that I turned your assault into some coming of age tale about my life, that I called myself a “Survivor”. That you empowered me.
Instead, Peter, when I can’t sleep at night, I recall your apartment.
I remember the staircase and the pile of shoes near the door (Do you still have mine? Psychotic. Pathetic.). I see your living room with wall of relatable nerd DVD box sets. And your bedroom, with hot air balloon trim, clearly from a previous tenant (A child? Likely. Could you possibly be more monstrous?)
And I imagine showing up in the middle of the night, and you recognize me instantly, and you knew you were absolutely foolish to ever feel safe at all.
And you aren’t safe, Peter. Not from me. And I know, deep, deep down, you know that, and for the rest of your life, you should move through it knowing that you are, as a result of your own monstrosity, just a little bit less safe than you could’ve been if you had just been ….better.
And I feel that comfort again, today. Because sometimes, in the absence of justice, vigilantism isn’t the only option (though, Peter, it is an option). Instead, for some of us, justice is in the never, ever gifting you with the freedom of my forgiveness. In the making sure you, too, get to feel as unsafe as I now get to feel, for the rest of our lives.
And, as we watch our enemies become more frothing-mouthed and emboldened at the national scale, there is a bold fire growing inside me, too, Peter, as the hope for “justice” slips further and further from the realm of possibilities, watching your predator brethren once again ascend to our highest ranks.
That’s justice for me, Peter: knowing that at any time, I could come for you. And knowing that inside, that fear lives in you, like a cancer.
And your fear lives in me, too, like a lullaby.
