Unexpected Forgiveness

Around August every year, I am struck by a loss I hope to never regain, the boyfriend who ended my childhood ten years ago. I mean that in no sort of sexual way. He entered my body, true, but with a steak knife, in spots that have since become small, soft mounds of scar tissue on my back.

Each year, I have an impulse to call him and say, “Remember when?” the way one would normally recall a romantic evening or trip to the beach.

Remember when I promised to marry you in exchange for dropping the knife?

Remember when our eyes met, while you sat handcuffed in the police car and I paced nervously in the driveway, wearing my perforated shirt?

Remember when you called me from prison, hoping to rekindle a friendship?

These things are lost in the telling to others.

For more than eight years, the anger gnawed at me, every time I locked the bathroom door to shower, every time a big screen stabbing made me flinch, every time I couldn’t resist the urge to check every unlikely hiding spot in my house.

In the eighth year, I started writing for the daily paper in the town we still share. I had just gotten married, finally gaining the invisibility that comes of a new last name, when the paper asked for my picture to publish with my editorials.

It was an unnecessary risk, yet I agreed. Hiding had become exhausting.

I awaited his response and rushed to get it when it arrived; a personal letter at the paper’s office. Nervously, I ripped the envelope open in my car… it wasn’t from him. Fear was no long necessary.

Without fear, the anger dissipated, like house lights turning on at the end of a horror movie. I hadn’t known if I would ever be able to forgive him, but it happened almost effortlessly.

The least expected part of forgiveness is the sympathy I’ve regained, for the boy who was abused then disowned by two sets of parents, biological and adoptive, respectively. And for the pain he must have felt when the pedestal upon which he perched me crumbled. And for the four years in prison and the beatings I was told he received there.

Still, sympathy is no eraser and though I sometimes feel his absence like a hole in my gut, it is a hole I hope to never fill.