tags: obsessive love, unhealthy relationships, one-sided yearning, dissociation, infidelity, jealousy, violence (non-graphic), dark themes throughout
there is something humiliating about wanting a person this much.
not in a romantic way. romance arrives with flowers and introductions and names written next to each other on place cards. this is something else. this is finding a strand of his blond hair on my coat weeks later and carrying it around like a relic. this is hearing his song at a party and feeling my stomach drop as if god has just tapped me on the shoulder.
i think if he cut me open he would find himself inside. not my heart. something worse. my bloodstream, maybe. the place where my instincts live.
sometimes i imagine him years from now. older and changed. the kind of man strangers smile at on the street. and i wonder if i will still carry this version of him around with me, preserved like a dead saint behind glass. forever twenty-two. forever impossible. forever standing in the middle of some room with his hands in his pockets, surrounded by his entourage, while i ruin my life trying not to look at him.
i donโt even think he knows what heโs done.
i could tell him. i could sit across from him and explain that there are people who enter your life like natural disasters. people who rearrange the furniture of your mind and leave before the dust has even settled. i could explain that he has occupied entire years of my life without ever asking for permission.
but what would be the point?
the moon does not apologize for the tide.
the papers always wanted a reason. that was the first thing i learned after the trial.
journalists love reasons. psychologists love reasons. judges love reasons most of all. they want everything arranged neatly in little boxes so they can point to the exact moment a life went wrong. childhood trauma. addiction. pathology. a neat little fracture running through the center of the story.
what they cannot accept is that sometimes a person simply walks into your life and alters the atmosphere of it. sometimes there is no explanation more sophisticated than that.
i was twenty-four when i met him. older than him, or maybe twenty-three. the exact age changes depending on which memory i am standing inside.
memory is unreliable like that. it softens some things and sharpens others. i can no longer remember what i wore that night. i cannot remember the names of half the people who were even there. but i remember him with an almost supernatural clarity. the way he stood in the middle of a crowded room looking strangely detached from it, as though everybody else had been added later. his pale blond hair. his dark clothes. he was so fucking tall. the way people watched him when they thought he wasnโt looking.
most of all, i remember the feeling. it wasnโt love at first sight. it was recognition. as though some deeply damaged part of me had lifted its head and said, there you are.
i wish i could tell you he was kind. that would make everything so much easier. but kindness was never what drew me to him.
heโs the greatest at what he does. that was the first thing anyone told you about hollis before they told you anything else. he was a musician. a rising star. by the time i met him his songs were already starting to escape the small rooms theyโd been written in. there was something so reckless about him. being around him constantly felt like standing too close to the edge of a roof. not because he pushed people. because he made them too curious about falling.
the first few months were harmless enough. parties, texts, long nights drifting through cities neither of us seemed particularly attached to. looking back, i think i mistook proximity for intimacy. there is a special kind of delusion that develops when you want somebody badly enough. every glance becomes significant. every conversation feels loaded with hidden meaning. you begin constructing an entire cathedral from scraps of evidence.
a hand lingering on your shoulder. a message arriving after midnight. an invitation that was probably sent to ten other people.
you convince yourself these things mean something because the alternative is unbearable. the alternative is admitting you have built a religion around coincidence.
by the time things became physical, the disaster had already happened. the catastrophe wasnโt crossing a line. the catastrophe was that i had spent months turning him into the center of my internal universe. every decision was already bending toward him. every city became a city he had played. every song on the radio became a song he might like, or hate, or steal from. every version of my future contained him somewhere in the background like a watermark.
the sex only gave the obsession somewhere to live. that is what nobody understands. they think desire begins with touch. in reality desire begins much earlier. it begins when another person starts occupying territory inside your mind that should belong to you.
the first time hollis kissed me, it was in the bathroom of someone elseโs apartment.
i donโt remember whose apartment it was, and that bothers me sometimes. the mind keeps the strangest things and throws away the useful ones. i remember the tiles were green and cracked near the sink. i remember a girl outside the door laughing so loudly it sounded like she was crying. i remember the mirror being dirty, fingerprints and old powder and the cloudy ghost of somebodyโs breath dried against the glass. i remember his hand on the lock, turning it slowly, as if he had all the time in the world, as if the entire party had been arranged only to bring us to that room.
he did not ask if he could kiss me. he just did.
i had imagined it so many times by then that when it finally happened, it felt less like a beginning than a memory returning to its rightful place. his mouth tasted like marlboro reds. i remember thinking, stupidly, there you are again even though heโd been in front of me the whole night.
he kissed me like he was bored with me and starving for me at the same time. that was his talent. making indifference feel intimate. making you feel chosen by the simple accident of his attention landing on you. his long fingers were at the side of my throat, not tight, not gentle either, just present enough that i could feel my pulse move against them. i wanted to be embarrassed by how quickly my body answered him, but embarrassment requires distance, and i had none left. i had been waiting too long for my dignity to still matter.
when we came out, nobody cared. that was another humiliation. the world had not changed. the music was still playing. someone had spilled wine on the floor. a boy i vaguely knew was shouting about a missing lighter. the girl outside the bathroom looked at me once, then looked away, bored. i wanted some visible evidence of what had happened. a mark on my face. a change in the air. instead i walked back into the room exactly as i had left it.
hollis did not look at me for the next twenty minutes. i counted. at first i thought he was being careful. then i thought he was being cruel. then i thought, maybe this is what he does when he cares about someone. already i had begun the work of translating neglect into mystery. already i was helping him hurt me.
later that night, he touched my lower back as he passed me in the hallway. nothing. a lazy brush of his hand, gone before anyone could notice. but i felt it everywhere. i hated myself for that. i hated the way my body made a shrine out of crumbs. i hated that a person could give me so little and still take up so much room.
he started writing to me late.
never during the day. his daylight belonged to other people. his friends, the label people whoโd started circling that year, ordinary girls with ordinary expectations. i got the hours after midnight, when the city had gone dishonest and everybody beautiful was either drunk or lonely or pretending not to be both.
come here, he would write.
i lived for that. my name in his chat felt more intimate than anything he said out loud. i would stare at it until the letters stopped looking like language.
this is the part people judge, because it looks so simple from the outside. a phone lights up. a girl makes a choice. she could stay home. she could sleep. she could preserve whatever remains of her self-respect. but obsession does not feel like a choice when you are inside it. it feels like weather. it arrives, and your whole body already knows which direction to move.
sometimes i would find him at a bar with six other people, and he would barely acknowledge me. sometimes he would pull me into a cab without explaining where we were going. sometimes he would be tender in ways so sudden they felt almost violent. his head in my lap while strangers talked around us, his fingers playing with the hem of my sleeve, his mouth near my ear saying things too quiet for anyone else to hear. not declarations. never that. he was too clever for declarations. he understood instinctively that uncertainty was more addictive.
i learned to survive on almost. almost affection. almost jealousy. almost mine.
the first time i slept in his bed, it was morning by the time we got there. his place was colder than i expected. a railroad apartment two floors above a shuttered bodega, the kind of building his label kept threatening to move him out of. ash in a chipped mug on the table. a guitar case propped against the radiator with a busted latch. clothes in a dark pile by the door. there was something boyish about the mess of it, and for one brief second it made me sad. not for myself. for him. i saw, or thought i saw, the outline of some hidden damage. some private wound i could be the first to understand.
that was another mistake. women like me are always looking for a wound. give us a beautiful enough wound and we will crawl inside it. we will call it intimacy. we will call it fate. we will mistake the locked room for an invitation.
he kissed me against the wall before i had taken my coat off. it was not romantic. it was better than romantic. romance would have made me suspicious, would have required a version of myself i didnโt trust. this was uglier, more immediate, easier to believe. his hands were cold. mine were shaking. i laughed once, not because anything was funny, but because my body had become too full of feeling and needed somewhere to put it.
after we fucked he got up to smoke by the window. i stayed in bed and watched him because i didnโt know what else to do. there is a particular loneliness that only happens after youโve been touched by someone who doesnโt love you. itโs worse than ordinary loneliness because your body has already been fooled. it has already opened the door. it is standing there with flowers while the house burns down behind it.
he did not ask what i was thinking. i would have told him anything. he could have asked about my childhood, my fears, my worst memory, and i would have handed it over like a room key. but he didnโt ask, because he didnโt need to know me to have me. i understood that much later. at the time, i mistook his lack of curiosity for depth. i thought silence meant he felt too much. i thought distance meant he was afraid.
he came back to bed and put his hand on my stomach. not lovingly. absently. as if i were an object heโd forgotten he owned. i should have hated it. instead i felt chosen by him again.
when i left the next morning, he didnโt get up. he opened his eyes only halfway and said my name, soft and sleepy. for weeks i lived on that.
outside, the city was bright and obscene. people were buying bread. a woman was walking a dog in a little red sweater. the world had the nerve to continue in its ordinary way. i stood on the pavement with my hair tangled and my mouth swollen and felt as though something sacred and awful had been done to me.
i went home and showered. i washed him off my skin and felt betrayed by the water. i checked my phone before iโd even dried my hands.
and that became the shape of my life. after him, always nothing. and then, eventually, something. each time, i forgave the silence immediately. i didnโt even make him earn it.
by winter i had stopped pretending i had control. iโd become smaller, more alert, more superstitious. i began dressing for the possibility of seeing him. i began going to places i knew he might be. never obviously, i still had pride, or something wearing prideโs clothes. iโd tell myself i wanted to see friends, hear music, be out in the city. but underneath every reason was the real one, glowing like rot.
the intermittent reward. if he had disappeared completely, i might have survived him. if heโd been consistently cruel, i might have developed some dignity. but he returned just often enough to keep the wound open. he knew, in the lazy animal way some people know their own power, that he could leave and come back and find me changed only by how much more grateful i was.
one night i saw him with another girl for the first time. not the girl. not yet, not the one everyone would later know from the photographs and the court documents. this was someone else. black hair cut to her jaw, a silver bag under her arm, laughing at something heโd said, touching his sleeve like she had invented touching. he leaned down to hear her better, and the gesture was so familiar i felt briefly insane. i had thought certain movements belonged to me. the tilt of his head. the private angle of his attention.
i watched them from across the bar and felt something inside me detach.
hollis saw me eventually. for one second his eyes moved over me without surprise. that hurt more than guilt would have. guilt would have meant i mattered enough to complicate him. instead he looked almost amused, as if we were sharing a joke i hadnโt agreed to be part of.
he made me wait for it. finished his drink. said something to the girl. let her touch his arm once more. then crossed the room slowly, beautiful and unbothered, while i stood there trying not to look like my entire body had become a crime scene.
โyouโre staring,โ he said.
i could have asked who she was. i could have demanded clarity. instead i became elegant. thatโs what women do when theyโre humiliated in public. we become elegant or we die.
โi was looking for someone,โ i said.
he glanced behind him, amused. โwell, theyโre not over there.โ
โclearly.โ he stepped closer when he said it, close enough that i could smell him. cigarettes and the cedar thing he wore that iโd later find in three different drugstores and never be able to place. my anger dissolved so quickly it frightened me. i hated how bad i was at staying wounded in his presence.
he didnโt touch me. he only looked at me a little too long, then leaned in and said, โdonโt be so dramatic, please.โ
quietly. almost fondly. as though my pain was something between us. that sentence stayed with me for months.
i repeated it to myself when he ignored me. when he appeared with other girls. when i woke up ashamed. when i promised myself i would stop answering and then answered anyway.
it became a spell. a leash.
the next time he called, i went to him. it was raining, and i remember arriving at his building with wet hair and mascara under my eyes, furious at myself and still hoping heโd notice. he opened the door barefoot, wearing a black sweater with holes at the cuffs, his hair pulled into a low bun, a new song bleeding out of the speakers behind him. something slower than what he usually wrote, half a verse looping over and over like he hadnโt decided yet whether to keep it.
โyouโre soaked,โ he said.
i wanted to say, because of you.
โitโs raining,โ i said instead.
inside, his apartment was warm and dim. i sat on the edge of his bed while he looked for cigarettes, ignoring me with practiced ease. two glasses sat on the nightstand. lipstick on one of them. not mine.
i saw it immediately. i think he saw me see it. neither of us mentioned it. that silence was more obscene than anything that had happened between us.
he came over eventually and stood in front of me, put his hand under my chin, tilted my face up. i hated him then. for the first time, desire and hatred arrived together so completely i couldnโt tell them apart.
โyouโre mad,โ he said.
his thumb moved once along my jaw. what happened after that was not tender, and i wonโt pretend it was. it was a negotiation conducted through skin, because language would have exposed too much. i let him kiss me because refusing would have felt like admitting i wanted something from him. i kissed him back because i did. i wanted apology. i wanted possession. i wanted to climb inside his body and remove every trace of anyone who had been there before me.
afterward i cried in his bathroom without making a sound. i stood at the mirror with my hands gripping the sink until my own face looked unfamiliar. behind me, his towel hung from its hook. his toothbrush sat in a glass. these ordinary objects devastated me. they suggested a life he had when i wasnโt there. a life that continued without me. a life in which i was not central, not necessary, not even known.
when i came back into the room he was lying on the bed smoking, one arm behind his head. he said nothing. i lay down beside him. he put the cigarette out, turned off the lamp, pulled me against him in the dark.
after that night, things almost became normal. i spent more time at his apartment. sometimes heโd disappear into the studio for hours and leave me on the couch while his friends drifted through carrying beer bottles and half-finished arguments about a bridge that wasnโt working. sometimes weโd order takeout and half-watch something neither of us could name afterward. sometimes heโd call just because he was bored.
that last one meant everything to me. a normal person would not have interpreted boredom as affection. but i did, because boredom suggested comfort, and comfort suggested permanence, and permanence suggested i might not be entirely delusional.
the frightening thing is i genuinely started to relax. i knew which mug was his favorite. i knew he hated people touching his hair but secretly liked it when they did. i knew he slept with the television on because he couldnโt stand complete silence. i knew all these tiny useless things and mistook knowledge for intimacy.
then one afternoon i opened a kitchen cupboard looking for coffee and found a pink toothbrush. for a second i simply stared at it. not because a toothbrush means anything, but because it means everything. it means somebody had been there often enough to leave part of themselves behind. somebody had crossed the border i thought belonged to me.
hollis walked in and found me holding it. he looked from me to the toothbrush, then back, and smiled, as if he already knew exactly what i was thinking.
โyouโre making that face again.โ
he shrugged. โi donโt know.โ
โit probably belongs to somebody.โ
somebody. not a name. not a person.
i looked at him and felt something strange. not anger, but the first faint outline of it. the first suggestion that maybe i wasnโt the only one building myths. maybe hollis had one too. maybe his favorite trick was making everyone feel special while never belonging to anyone at all. and for the first time since meeting him, i found myself wondering whether i actually wanted him, or whether i simply wanted to win.
a few weeks later i was lying on the floor of his living room while he sat on the couch above me, smoking, scrolling his phone. rain against the windows. a half-finished song playing low from somewhere in the apartment. iโd later recognize three bars of it on the record that came out after everything, after his name had a different kind of weight attached to it, and iโd have to leave the room.
i remember looking up at him and realizing i knew almost nothing about him. i knew his favorite cigarettes. i knew he always slept on the left side of the bed. i knew the exact expression he made when he was trying not to laugh. but i didnโt know what scared him. i didnโt know his childhood. i didnโt know who had taught him to be this impossible.
โcan i ask you something?โ
โwhatโs the worst thing youโve ever done?โ
for the first time he looked up. not surprised. interested. the room went quiet.
โthatโs a weird question.โ
โyou can tell a lot about people from the answer.โ
โno, you canโt. because nobody tells the truth.โ
โexactly.โ he took a drag. โif people knew the worst thing about me, theyโd decide thatโs who i am.โ
something about the way he said it made my stomach tighten. as though heโd already learned that lesson somewhere, the hard way, before any of this.
his gaze met mine and held. โsee? this is why i donโt tell you things. you immediately start trying to solve me.โ
i was. i wanted the next layer, and the next, and the next. i wanted to get underneath his skin and find the machinery. i wanted a reason.
years later, sitting in a courtroom while strangers tried to invent one for me, i would understand the irony. i spent years trying to understand hollis. i never once stopped to understand myself.
i had been handed the evidence repeatedly. the toothbrush, the other girls, the unanswered messages, the casual cruelty, the way he could make me feel indispensable one day and forget i existed the next. any reasonable person would have assembled those facts into a warning. instead i assembled them into a challenge.
thatโs the part nobody understood at the trial. they kept talking about motive as though motives arrive fully formed, as though people wake up one morning and decide to destroy themselves. in reality, self-destruction is incremental. a habit. a language learned through repetition. at some point my life divided itself into two categories: things that involved hollis, and things that didnโt. the first category expanded until it swallowed the second.
friends stopped inviting me places. i told myself it was because everyone was busy, then because we were getting older, then because adulthood naturally separates people. the reality was simpler: conversations with me had become impossible. a song reminded me of him. a city reminded me of him. eventually people stopped trying. i noticed and did nothing. or maybe i noticed and liked it.
isolation can feel romantic when youโre obsessed. it creates the illusion that your suffering is meaningful, that you and the object of your fixation exist in some elevated reality inaccessible to ordinary people. looking back, i think iโd become addicted to the loneliness itself. the frightening thing was how normal it all felt from the inside.
one evening, sitting in a restaurant with friends, someone asked what i wanted to do in five years. i had nothing. the future had become impossible to imagine unless hollis was standing somewhere inside it. that frightened me more than any of the other girls ever had, because other girls could be hated, could be competed with. but what do you do when the thing destroying you is not another person, but your own willingness to disappear?
understanding a disaster and stopping it are two entirely different things. if anything, awareness made me more desperate. a drowning person who realizes theyโre drowning does not become less dangerous. they become willing to grab onto anything. and hollis always seemed to know exactly when i was about to let go.
people imagined him afterward as some kind of mastermind. a manipulator pulling strings. a beautiful sociopath engineering my downfall from the shadows. that would have made everything a whole different story. the truth was less flattering: i think he simply liked being wanted, the way some people like sunlight, or applause, or smoking a cigarette after sex. not maliciously. instinctively. he collected devotion the way other people collected records. every time i began drifting away, he would reappear. a text, a call, his name lighting up my screen at two in the morning. and every time, my stupid heart reacted the same way.
there is no drug more humiliating than hope. itโs what keeps gamblers at slot machines, what keeps women like me standing outside apartment buildings at midnight, convincing ourselves weโre making choices.
by spring iโd stopped asking questions i didnโt want answered. i stopped asking about the girls. i stopped asking where heโd been. ignorance was easier to live with than certainty. certainty has edges. certainty cuts. fantasy is soft. fantasy lets you keep breathing.
reality doesnโt care what helps you breathe. it arrives eventually. when it arrived for me, it was wearing somebody elseโs perfume.
i noticed it before i saw her. sweet, unfamiliar. i was standing in his kitchen making coffee. by then iโd become comfortable enough to perform little domestic rituals in spaces that didnโt belong to me. when i noticed a black cardigan hung over the back of a chair. not mine. i stared at it for a long time. thereโs something uniquely strange about recognizing another womanโs absence. she wasnโt there. the cardigan was. i touched the sleeve. soft fabric, expensive. something twisted in me, not because i thought i owned him, even then i knew better than that, but because i had spent so much time imagining myself as an exception that discovering i was interchangeable felt like a kind of death.
when hollis walked in and found me holding it, his eyes moved from my face to the cardigan and back. i waited for guilt. instead he opened the fridge and asked if there was coffee left.
i held it up. his expression didnโt change. โitโs a cardigan.โ
he shrugged. โi donโt know.โ
i hated the shrug. i hated the calmness. i hated that he might actually be telling the truth because if so many people passed through his life that he could no longer keep track of what they left behind, what chance did i have of becoming unforgettable?
i put the cardigan down and left. no scene. no screaming. i just walked out. i remember the elevator ride down more clearly than i remember most birthdays. my reflection in the metal doors, strangely detached, normal, tired maybe, slightly pale, but otherwise normal. it felt unfair. i wanted visible injuries. instead i looked exactly the same.
that afternoon i blocked his number. unblocked it three hours later. blocked it again. unblocked it before midnight.
for almost two weeks we didnโt speak. the longest weโd gone since the beginning. i wish i could tell you i flourished. what actually happened was less inspiring. i became obsessed with not being obsessed. i checked my phone every five minutes. i stalked accounts belonging to people i barely knew, zoomed in on photographs, searched reflections in mirrors. i became a detective investigating my own humiliation.
he didnโt contact me. not once. as long as he kept returning, i could pretend i mattered. silence offered no such comfort. silence forced me to consider that the entire relationship existed primarily inside my own head.
by the end of the second week i felt like a ghost haunting my own life. then, one friday night, my phone lit up.
i stared at it. the room was completely silent. my heart was beating so hard i could hear it. years later, the prosecutor would describe my actions as irrational. looking at that message glowing on the screen, i think i finally understood what he meant, because i knew i should ignore it, knew exactly what would happen if i answered, knew i was walking willingly toward the thing destroying me.
i carried my phone into the kitchen. made tea. checked the screen. checked it again. ten minutes. twenty. forty. the tea went cold beside me.
i wish i could tell you i reacted like a normal person. instead i became convinced the next thirty seconds would change everything. every time the message wasnโt there, the disappointment closed around my throat like a hand. by midnight i wasnโt pretending to do anything else. my entire existence had narrowed to a glowing screen and the absence of his name on it.
thereโs a point where obsession becomes embarrassing even to the person experiencing it. i reached it around one in the morning, catching my reflection in the dark window above the sink. i looked insane. not dramatically. just pathetic. exhausted. a grown woman refreshing the same conversation as though persistence could force reality to be kinder. that should have snapped me out of it. instead it made me worse.
the anger arrived. not clean, not useful, something feverish and directionless. i paced circles around my apartment. i checked his social media, then his friendsโ, then people i barely knew. i started building theories from scraps. maybe his phone died. maybe he was with somebody. maybe the message had been meant for someone else.
i stared at the thought like it had appeared in front of me physically. i could tolerate other girls in theory. i could tolerate uncertainty. what i couldnโt tolerate was the possibility that all this time i had mistaken coincidence for significance. that the message might not have been fate. might not have even been intended for me.
by two in the morning i was no longer thinking rationally. i knew that even then. some detached part of me sat in the corner of my mind, watching with growing alarm. look at you. look what youโve become. but observation and intervention are different things. knowing youโre losing your mind doesnโt mean you know how to stop.
when i finally grabbed my keys it didnโt feel wrong. no thunderclap, no declaration. i wasnโt thinking iโm going to confront him. i wasnโt thinking anything coherent at all. i just knew i couldnโt spend another hour alone with my imagination. i needed certainty, even if the certainty destroyed me.
the drive is mostly gone now. i remember a red light reflected in a puddle. my hands gripping the wheel hard enough to hurt. the feeling that something terrible was already happening and i was simply arriving late to it.
by the time i reached his building my heart felt detached from the rest of me. i stood outside, trying to convince myself to leave. for one brief, miraculous second i almost did. then i saw the light on, and i knew. not what i was about to find, just that whatever remained of the story iโd been telling myself was waiting upstairs.
the stairwell smelled faintly of cleaning detergent. a stupid thing to remember. not the kind of detail that should survive police interviews and court transcripts and years of trying to forget.
with every flight, the feeling worsened. for months i had survived on ambiguity. maybe he likes me. maybe he misses me. maybe this means something. maybe maybe maybe.
my entire relationship with hollis had been built on maybe. standing outside his door, i had the overwhelming sense that the word had run out of road.
the music was loud enough to hear from the hallway, low bass hitting the walls. the door opened easily. heโd given me the code once, drunk, both of us laughing about something neither of us would remember.
inside, everything looked normal. that was the first betrayal. the lamp on. his jacket over the arm of the couch. an empty glass on the table. a record sleeve on the floor. i wanted the room to acknowledge what was happening. instead everything was ordinary, in the way disasters often are.
i called his name once. no answer. the music continued. i took another step, then another, watching myself from somewhere outside my body.
the bedroom door wasnโt closed. only slightly open. just enough.
people always ask about the moment itself, as though there was a single frame where everything shattered. a voice. a movement. a glimpse of blond hair. a hand. your brain assembling the image before your heart is ready for it. i remember stopping completely. the blood leaving my face. my own breathing. understanding, with a clarity so sharp it almost felt peaceful, that every fear iโd spent months negotiating with had been telling the truth.
for a few seconds nobody noticed me. standing there invisible. watching the world function perfectly well in my absence. there is a specific pain in realizing you were never at the center of somebody elseโs story. not because they pushed you out, but because you were never there to begin with. something inside me gave way. not all at once. more like a building finally collapsing after years of structural damage. every lie i had told myself arrived at once and demanded payment.
i donโt remember making a decision. what i remember is standing in that doorway and feeling the world narrow, and somewhere very far away, as though it belonged to somebody else entirely, hearing hollis say my name. once. then again.
because by then, the person who had spent years waiting to be chosen had already disappeared. and something much more dangerous was standing in her place.
people always ask what i was thinking. itโs one of the first questions they ask. the police, the psychologists, the journalists, strangers online whoโve somehow convinced themselves that understanding is the same thing as forgiveness. they all want access to that exact moment. they want to climb inside my head and find the sentence that caused everything. the mistake they make is assuming there was one.
i wasnโt standing there thinking iโm going to hurt someone. i wasnโt thinking anything at all. for months my mind had been unbearable, constantly moving, constantly analyzing. the second i saw them together, all that noise disappeared. i remember hollis saying my name, multiple times. the girl turning toward me. the confusion on her face. and then a silence so complete it almost felt holy.
it was as though my brain had reached the end of something. the end of the story. the end of the waiting. every terrible possibility iโd spent months negotiating with was standing directly in front of me. there was nothing left to wonder about. reality had arrived.
it didnโt hurt the way i thought it would. i had imagined this moment so many times: discovering another girl, betrayal, heartbreak and thought it would feel like being stabbed. instead it felt like falling through ice. cold, absolute.
for a few seconds i simply stood there, looking at her. i noticed ridiculous things. the way her hair fell across one shoulder. a chipped fingernail. the shape of her mouth. i thought she looked younger than me. then i hated myself for noticing. then i hated her for existing. then i hated him. then myself again. everything blurred together.
hollis was talking. i could see his mouth moving, could see him getting up, moving toward me, saying my name again, but it all felt very far away, as though i was watching it through thick glass. the room seemed wrong. too bright. too sharp. every detail painfully clear. dust floating in the air, the record skipping softly in the other room, cigarettes and sweat and sex in the air. everything felt unreal except the fact that she was there. real. no longer an idea, no longer a possibility, no longer a story i told myself at three in the morning. she was standing right in front of me, breathing, looking back, occupying a space i had spent months trying to earn.
i was asked to describe what happened next, and i would tell them the truth, which is that i donโt fully know. there is a gap there. not a convenient one. not the kind a person invents to protect herself. a real one. the kind memory makes when it canโt hold something and live at the same time.
i know there was a weight in my hand that hadnโt been there before. something off the dresser, i think, though even that i only pieced together later from what the police said. i know the record kept skipping in the other room, the same four bars, over and over. i know hollis was saying my name like a word that had stopped meaning anything.
and then i was sitting on the floor with my back against the wall, and the room was very quiet, and my hands didnโt look like mine.
i donโt remember deciding anything. iโve turned that sentence over a thousand times since, trying to find the lie in it, because everyone wants there to be a decision. the prosecutor built his entire case around the idea that there was one. a moment of clarity, intent, a girl who drove across town with a plan already forming. but i didnโt plan it. i want to be exact about that, even now, even though exactness has never once helped me. it happened the way weather happens. i was standing in a doorway, and then i was on the floor, and somewhere in between, something that could never be undone had already been done.
the police report, when i finally made myself read it months later, in a small room with my lawyer watching my face, used language so flat it almost made the thing sound survivable.
single sharp-force injury. consistent with a struggle. the defendant was found at the scene.
i read those words and thought, thatโs not what it felt like. it felt like the whole world tipping sideways and never quite coming back level.
hollis called it in himself. that detail came out at trial, and i remember the courtroom going very still when it did like everyone in the room was recalibrating who i was allowed to be in the story. not even the man who found her. the man whoโd been in the room the entire time. he told the dispatcher his own name twice, like he didnโt trust himself to remember it. he didnโt touch me. he didnโt go near her again either. he just stood by the window, the way he had that first morning, except this time there was nothing left to perform for.
i donโt remember the ambulance. i remember being in the back of a car with my hands zip-tied in front of me, looking at them like they belonged to someone i used to know.
the trial took eleven months to begin and three weeks to finish, which feels like the wrong ratio for something that changes a life so completely. i sat at a table with my lawyer and learned the particular humiliation of hearing your own private religion described in legal terms.
obsessive attachment. escalating fixation. a pattern of surveillance behavior.
they read out my messages to him. they read out his to me. the ones that said nothing, come here, where are you and somehow on the record those two words sounded crueler than they ever had at two in the morning, because now they had an audience.
the medical examiner spoke for forty minutes. i wonโt write down what he said. some things, even in a story iโm allowed to tell, i donโt think iโm allowed to put into anyone elseโs hands. iโll only say i sat there and made myself listen to all of it, every clinical sentence, because it seemed like the smallest, latest form of honesty still available to me, to not look away from a single word.
her name was wren. i want that written somewhere, because for most of this story sheโs been a cardigan, a toothbrush, a girl with dark hair, an idea i built out of jealousy long before she was ever a person to me. her mother spoke during sentencing. she did not look at me once. i understood that. i would not have looked at me either.
hollis testified on the second week.
i hadnโt seen him in the months between the arrest and the trial. they kept us apart deliberately, lawyers on both sides agreeing on that one thing if nothing else and when he walked into the courtroom i had the strange, sick experience of feeling my body respond to him the exact same way it always had, even then, even there. some animal part of me that had never gotten the message. heโd cut his hair. he looked older in a way that had nothing to do with time. there was a stillness to him that hadnโt been there before, like the performance had finally, permanently switched off.
he didnโt look at me when he sat down. he looked at me once, near the end, when the prosecutor asked him to describe our relationship, and he hesitated long enough that i watched the jury notice it.
โi donโt know what to call it,โ he said finally. โi donโt think either of us knew what to call it.โ
it was the most honest thing heโd ever said to me, and he said it to a room full of strangers instead of to my face which felt, somehow, like the precise shape of everything that had gone wrong between us from the very beginning.
he didnโt ask to see me afterward. i didnโt expect him to. thereโs a particular kind of ending where you understand, all at once and without anyone explaining it to you, that the story youโd been telling yourself was never the story anyone else was in.
iโm writing this in a room not unlike the one i grew up in. small, gray, indifferent to whoever happens to be inside it. iโve had a long time now to sit with the version of myself that walked up those stairs, and i wonโt tell you iโve forgiven her, because forgiveness would require me to believe she had no choice, and i donโt believe that.
i think i had dozens of choices, scattered across years, and i declined every single one of them in favor of staying inside a feeling that told me i was the center of something. i was never the center of anything. thatโs the part the courtroom couldnโt make me understand, no matter how many ways they said it. it took wrenโs motherโs face, turned permanently away from mine, to teach me that.
i still think of him sometimes. less than i used to. the mind heals, even when you donโt want it to, even when some shameful corner of you would rather keep the wound open, because the wound was, for a long time, the only thing that made you feel like a main character.
but i think of her more now. wren. a girl with a chipped fingernail and hair that fell over one shoulder, who walked into a room she had every right to be in, and met a version of me that had been built, brick by brick, out of midnight texts and unanswered messages and a hunger i never once tried to name honestly until it was far, far too late to matter.
iโd like to tell you thatโs the end of it. that this page is where the story closes and i become someone who learned something clean. but i still catch myself doing the thing i did with him. building a whole cathedral out of a single kind word from a guard, a single visit, a single letter. i still donโt always know the difference between wanting to be good and wanting to be forgiven.
maybe thatโs the part nobody puts in the report.
a/n: i poured my whole heart into this story.
kianamaiart
pixelskylines
gracieabrams
snowghoul
s-u-f-j-a-n-s-t-e-v-e-n-s
titsay
germansingergirl
