a long goodbye

If a grown man did something bad to you as a child, something that put you in therapy for years, that sent you into spirals of fear every time you poked your head outside, and you found that son of a bitch on Facebook, what would you do?

What if, for 8 long years, you spent hundreds of hours in lawyers' offices, deposition rooms, and courthouses; your loving parents emptied their savings accounts and lost sleep and happiness and trust: What if everything came down to nothing but a quiet, unheralded law change that you are restricted from speaking about and seeing that man's pasty, horrible face on a social networking sight "searching for love"? What would you do?

This is what I want to do. I want to learn how to fight. I want to learn how to split melons in half so their mushy insides Rorschach on the ground. I want to arm my body with the knowledge of vengeance, like a madcap heroine in some ridiculous Hollywood Kung Fu movie, so that I cannot lose my weapon on my journey to find this man-- my body will be the weapon. And then I want to hunt him down. I want to terrify him in his sleep, for months. I want him to know, without a shred of doubt, what it means to feel so completely helpless that the very ground you walk on has become your enemy. I want him to be afraid to turn corners and to be in his own locked bedroom and to think.

This world is so terrifyingly upside down, so backwards, for it to allow a man to molest children and then to log onto a virtual networking site 15 years later and search for a woman to fuck, with no mention of who he is as a human being. It's twisted in ways that it should never have become: Lawyers who represent the "good" side are willing to allow this man go unbranded, are willing to falter at the final stretch and cow tow to the whims of a judicial system that discourages change. For money.

Our lawyer failed us. In the eleventh hour, this self-proclaimed civil rights lawyer faltered like a spoiled prizefighter and bailed on me, bailed on my parents, bailed on her daughter, bailed on every woman in the world. We fought for eight years to keep this man from being allowed to be around children and now he is on Facebook looking for love.

Facebook has become the giant vanity mirror to Western culture, a masturbation tool that people I respect use everyday, that I myself use everyday, in the hopes that people will find me funny and worthy of talking to. And he is there, too. He could fuck your daughter. He could fuck your sister. He could fuck you-- and there is nothing I can do about it. In exchange for getting our lives back my family and I have unwittingly become the instigators of this man's undeserved freedom.

I dreamed I had the power to make what had happened to me un-happen, and everything was beautiful again the way it is for children. I had these dreams for months until I began to forget small things, like the smell of the air and the pavement and the room where the bad things occurred, where bits of me died in small, imperceptible ways. But the memories of these small deaths within me are still there and I know that, no matter how wonderful my life could become, I can never feel 100% safe again, and I have learned that this is true for many women. They carry it like the would anything they've become used to, something slightly crippling but still their own. A reminder to be aware, and a reminder to be brave.