The Day Your Assailant Dies
On the day your assailant dies, you will not find out. You will not find out for two more weeks. You will receive the call before you look him up. You will be in your third week of the new school year and wonder if this is a bad omen. You will shrug off superstition and rationalize that there is nothing special about three weeks into the school year, it was inevitable he’d die eventually – if not now, then the first week of winter break or the day after a really great date or your birthday or another potentially significant day. He would die; you would struggle to not let him ruin something which you would put extra significance upon because of the timing of his death coinciding with the shared day. This is simply how things go.
On the day your molester dies, you will finally be old enough to start feeling the full impacts of his actions, his lack of control. You will start to connect the dots and they’ll trace back to his desperate, flailing grasp for power over anyone. He brought you into this without asking and left, once again, selfishly and without warning. You will be angry that he is not here to see the damage he’s done, to look it in the eye. You will feel cheated that you never got to tell him that you did not fall prey, that you are bigger, better, stronger, and braver than he could have ever dreamed of being.
On the day the perpetrator’s years catch up with him, he will be alone. His obituary will be reluctantly written and even more reluctantly paid for by an estranged sister who only bothers because of her need for tradition and her hope that, by doing her part to help history remain recorded, life will somehow become just a slightest bit less chaotic. You will feel sorry for her, but mostly you will hate her. You will spend hours wondering what kind of monster memorializes a monster. A greater monster? A lesser, more pathetic monster?
On the day your abuser finally dies, it will be hard to explain to anyone. He’s dead. You should feel elated. You should feel free. He can’t hurt you now. But that’s not how this works just like this isn’t the day they’ll finally understand any of this. He took something and he could never return it, but, with the finality of his passing, it is impossible to pretend any longer – there’s no going back.
On that day, you will not feel free. You will not feel relieved. You will feel exactly the same way you have felt every single day since he entered your life and never left.
“The Day Your Assailant Dies” was originally a part of the unpublished You Deserve Each Other zine.