to me when someone who hurt me writes asking how he might make
amends. Delighted by the idea that I am being vindicated, I agree
to meet, noting the face I knew looks younger as he reads a catalog
of harms against me, most of which I have not been aware of, beyond,
yes, his periodic yelling or threatening, the marring of my home. Power
sifts between us as our bodies, too, shift. Item: he lied in rants to
damage my career. Item: at a party he grimaced and gestured to embarrass
me. I, too, had been young, had wanted what I assume he wanted: safety,
desire, maybe transformation. I had begged him to wear a coat in snow,
stand away from the lake’s edge, joke at a bar instead of wrestling
friends and strangers. I from earthquakes and he from hurricanes,
we were trained to prepare in parallel ways: avoiding aftershocks, live
power lines, other crisis chains. Fault is trivial but if on the night he talked
fast and faster and faster, I had recognized the folding words, not cried on
a couch, would he— It is effortful to forgive, effortful to remember.
