I don’t really know what to say.
Yeah…
It’s still hard to wrap my head around what happened.
I’m sorry.
I’m so angry at you.
You should be. I screwed up.
You didn’t just ‘screw up’.
Do you hate me?
Would it not be justified if I did?
Yeah. I’m sorry.
I don’t hate you. I still love you. That’s the worst part.
I’m sorry.
Stop apologising. It doesn’t make anything better.
I know, but... I don’t know what else to do. I can’t undo it.
It feels like I don’t even know you anymore. If you are who I thought you were, you wouldn’t have been capable of this.
I wish I could explain.
Me, too. I wish I could understand why you would do that. How you could do that. I thought I was supposed to mean something to you.
You did! You still do. You know how much I love you.
No, I don’t. Not anymore. I don’t know if a single word you told me was true.
I hate myself. So much.
Don’t do that. Don’t make me feel bad for you. You don’t deserve my sympathy.
I know. I’m-
Don’t say it. Please.
Okay.
I know you’re sorry. But you weren’t sorry enough to stop.
No, I...
You knew it was wrong. You felt bad about it, didn’t you? You were crying.
I felt terrible about it.
Then why did you keep going? Why didn’t you stop?
I don’t know. It didn’t feel like I could.
Of course you could. You were responsible for those actions. That was you. It was all you.
Yeah. I won’t deny that.
And still – I wish I’d told you to stop, I wish I’d stopped you.
No. Please don’t think like that. It wasn’t your fault.
That’s what I would say to anyone else, too. But I keep thinking, if I’d only slept with you earlier, if I hadn’t been wearing so little…
It wasn’t about what you were wearing.
It feels like I’m overreacting. It shouldn’t be such a big deal. Anyone else would’ve just let you do it. It shouldn’t even count. It’s barely anything.
No, it was- It was something.
I haven’t stopped wanting to vomit since it happened.
I’m sorry.
I hate that you seem to be doing fine.
Look at me; I’m not fine. How could I be? I don’t know how to live with myself after what I did.
I should’ve stopped you before you went that far.
That wasn’t up to you.
Why didn’t you just stop? Why didn’t you just fucking stop?
I don’t know, I… I don’t know. I have this compulsory crossing of people’s boundaries.
You didn’t ‘cross’ a boundary. You spat on it.
I… I guess I did.
Sometimes, I make myself live through it again in my mind. And I do to myself the things you did to me, imagining that it’s happening again. So I don’t let myself forget. I shouldn’t let myself forget.
No, you shouldn’t.
And then, sometimes, I just think, maybe it wasn’t so bad. It wasn’t that much. Maybe I’m just exaggerating.
No, please don’t. That’s not true. If it makes you feel like this, it was big enough.
Maybe. Maybe it was. I just want to be wrong, so I can forgive you and have you back. I’ve never missed anyone this much.
You don’t want me. Not the person you’ve realised I am.
That’s why I’m angry. Not for what you did to me, but what you did to us. Us. We were the best thing I had.
I hate myself for ruining it.
Did it even matter to you?
Of course it did. It meant the world to me.
And you threw it away like a piece of trash.
Sometimes, I ruin the good things I have because I don’t feel like I deserve them.
I shouldn’t care why you did it. Whatever your reasons, whatever you hoped to achieve, you hurt me in the process. That should be enough. I can’t bring myself to hate you.
You should. It’s what I deserve.
Don’t make me feel bad for you again. After you’d done it, when you started hitting yourself and banging your head against the wall, I had to make you stop. I had to comfort you. And I hate that you made me touch you after you touched- I hate it.
Please hate me. It would be so much easier for you.
Do you think I don’t know that? But I can’t. The kind of love I felt for you, it doesn’t just go away. Not that you would know.
I do know. You mean as much to me now as the day before it happened.
God. There’s nothing I want more than to just go back, and I wouldn’t let you stay in my room, and I wouldn’t suggest going back to sleep when we woke up the first time.
But you can’t. It happened.
It wasn’t something that happened. It was something you did.
Yeah. Yeah.
I don’t know if there’s much else to say.
I’m still sorry.
You should be.
I can’t apologise enough.
That’s true.
This is so hard.
Do you want to know what the worst part was? It was after you’d stopped, and you said, “I should leave before something bad happens.”
I don’t remember that.
I do. Because I lie awake at night wondering, “If that wasn’t bad, then what else would you have done to me?”
I wish I could say that I know.
I have a question. If I hadn’t taken your hand, would you have kept going?
I want to say no. But the truth is, I don’t know. It scares me what I’m capable of. I didn’t think I could do something like that. So I don’t know. I don’t know what I would have done.
I guess that’s all I needed to hear.
That’s it?
That’s it. I know you now.
Oh, my god, I- I’m sorry.
[silence]
Emma Jokinen is a queer writer from Sweden. She's currently living in Glasgow, Scotland and studying for an undergraduate degree in philosophy. Her story is based on a real experience from her first year at university, and consists of pieces from different conversations and diary entries from after the incident.
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