Not Even Four Years Makes a Difference

What felt like ages but had only been four years since she last saw him in person still sticks in her mind causing a shiver down her aching spine every time she tapped into that memory. It was just another trip to the local grocery store in the college town she lived in for almost six years. Yet she saw his blank face in the crowd as he walked down the aisle next to the one she was using to make a bee-line to the allergy medication she needed. For just a second that felt like minutes, he stared at her and then kept walking. No care in the world about the pain he had caused her before she came to her senses and dumped him all those years ago. 

She noticed in that brief moment he had gotten thinner and his clothes hung on him. His typical basketball jersey and jacket looked three sizes too large. Although he seemed not to care about the fact that he had seen the girl who dumped him four years before, he looked like he had not slept in ages. 

See, before she left the guy he was becoming an obvious alcoholic, and she had unfortunately succumbed to drinking alongside him more often than she would care to admit. Underaged, in college and dating an older guy, in the throws of hard courses that required so much of her attention. The booze became a way to slip away from the reality that she was nearly 1300 miles away from where she had lived all her life before and that if she wasn’t studying she often was alone listening to music. Her only other seemingly reliable friend being her roommate that later would come to be her manipulative and controlling ex-lover. 

At the point that she saw him for what she thought was the last time at the grocery store, she had cut back on the drinking and was wrapping up her last few years of school. All the while balancing the emotional and psychological drain of her roommate turned fiancee. That at the time she was basically blind to the abuse because it had become so normal for her. For before her then-girlfriend got her claws in her, the man she saw in the grocery store had raped her while they were drunk and he could not guarantee that it only happened once or that he had worn protection. Not to mention his possessiveness and inappropriate timing of physical contact in public. As she walked past him that day she thanked herself for not waiting longer to dump the guy. The day she broke up with him she had laryngitis from being sick but she couldn’t wait any longer. She had let him take advantage of her for too long and she had to take herself out of the situation no matter if she had to whisper or mouth the words, “I am breaking up with you.” 

Both after graduation and after things had blown up with her ex-fiancee, she caught wind that her ex-boyfriend that she had seen in the grocery store had died, she didn’t know how he died just that he was gone. It could have been from the pandemic that was ragging the world at that time, a car crash, anything. Nevertheless, she could not shake the feeling that he wasn’t truly gone. Yes, she hoped that one day he would get what he deserved for the pain he had caused her but that didn’t mean she wanted him dead. More than anything she had just hoped that he would not move on to another victim of his sexual abuse. For she had not been strong enough to go to the police back then and she had felt that it was her fault for letting herself get drunk around him. 

Honestly, she thought she had put the pain he had caused her behind her before she saw on the television one day the landmark Supreme court hearing of Bret Kavanaugh and sat and listened to Blasey Ford tell her story. She just completely broke down, couldn’t stop the tears from falling. Her then-fiancee told her to suck it up because many have been raped and it had been years since it had happened to her. It didn’t truly matter how much she had buried her pain and tried to suck it up in order to get her degrees, the memories were so raw at that moment she couldn’t keep it together. 

Back to her ex-boyfriend’s death, well she felt bad that he was dead she also did not grieve for him because at least she knew that he wouldn’t be out there hurting other women like herself for sure. Although his being dead is not the way she wanted to know there would not be more victims of his assault. She knew though that he had a family and she didn’t think they deserved to lose a son. 

Months after she had heard of his death, she was walking down the street of her hometown with her mask on her face and sunglasses to block out the unclouded sun. As she came around the corner of one of her favorite restaurants, she saw him again. Not only sending a shiver down her spine but literally making her jump back at the sight of him. For he was across the street and smiling at her. He then got into a blue car and headed down the street towards downtown. It had only been a moment but she could have sworn it was him. She thought maybe she had just seen someone who looked like him. Yet, he had been wearing clothes that were similar in style to that of what he had worn in the grocery store years prior. The man she saw that smiled at her at that moment was just as thin as he had looked before. His eyes still had dark circles and bags like they did in her old college town. So although he was supposedly dead, here she had possibly seen him in a place she did not expect him to be especially since he was supposed to have died. She headed home and tried to get the image of him smiling at her out of her mind but she could not. The man had smiled at her then went off down the road but had left her once again with the hurtful memories of what he had done to her. Making her relive through the assaults, the fights, the ways he had made her feel, and with the sinking pit in her stomach signaling that she would never truly be free of his hold on her soul.