Author: Angela Carbone

* Names have been changed 

I never imagined in my wildest dreams that I would reencounter my rapist. Only in my nightmares. But sometimes dreams that you have come true, whether they are good ones or not.

Perhaps I should explain why I never thought  I’d run into *Ernest again. Let me begin:

He was in the train station, emerging from the public restroom and it was as if time stood still. His black curly tendrils still in all the same places, his eyes wide like a doll–suspended in time. He was wearing the same ironically pretentious literary joke shirt that he was when he abandoned me in a Gregory’s in midtown two years prior. Over a deflated Americano he told me that he was leaving for Ireland to take some time to himself because “our relationship had deteriorated his motivations to write, see his family, and do the things he wanted to do”. I remember thinking, ‘funny how the tables have turned—he told me in the beginning I was encouraging him to write again, see his family, and do things he wanted to do.’ Throughout the conversation, he invented reasons for why he could not apologize and accept the effects of his actions, building a pile of excuses for why he couldn’t “work through” my claim that he had taken advantage of me.

So seeing him on American soil was jarring to say the least. I said hello, compelled when he tried to escape after our eyes met. I wouldn’t let him get away without acknowledging me again. He told me he was sick with Lyme disease and some chronic digestive issue where he couldn’t eat, and his trip to Ireland “didn’t turn out as well as he had hoped.” After all the trouble of trying to escape his life, he was reapplying to school and returning to the scene of the crime: his queens apartment and his former barista job.

When we met, the whole situation was charming. It was like two lights on separate ends of the earth had turned on in perfect synchronization. From behind the marble counter he asked if I had a boyfriend and I smiled knowing I had just left a difficult one behind. Ernest was a childhood alcoholic who had beaten the odds and was now trying to become a writer. I read his work and thought it was brilliant. He used the bathroom about seven times on our first date, which I thought was peculiar until I read about a character in his short story who used restrooms as a confessional where he faced his reflection. He was a gregarious vegetarian and would take me out to show me off to his friends. He spoke sweet words to me in his native Czech tongue before I felt I deserved them.

We had been dating for a few months and I really liked him. I had already met his family and we were exclusive. On this particular day I was feeling unwell, and he was feeling warmed up. The afternoon passed with the haze of a fever dream. We had gone to see his alma mater’s campus and afterward I had wanted to go home so I could eat dinner with my family; E and I had been spending so much time together I hadn’t seen my parents in what felt like a lifetime. When we returned to his apartment, I reclined supine on his mattress resting on his oak floor. I was only interested in keeping my sickness at bay when he started to put a belt around my neck. I laid there, in my fugue of sickness, not realizing until he was almost an inch from constricting me. I objected: “what the hell are you doing?” He answered something like, ‘just screwing around I wouldn’t have tightened it.’

That was the first strange thing.

Then he began to remove my pants.

Please not right now, I begged, I really don’t feel well. He said something like, come on, and the pants came off. ‘I just want you to be comfortable’.

Not wanting to start a fight or seem difficult, I conceded. As a woman with interesting and compelling things to say, I’ve been told again and again that it’s not nice to argue.

He got close to me, endeavoring to start a flame with soggy matches.

Lying beside me, he traced his hands down the shape of my back. They continued to slither until they found where they could remove my underwear. I said again, I had to go home…that I didn’t feel well. I pushed him gently aside. He proceeded to move his full shape over me, eclipse me until there were no words left to say.  He had already overpowered me and I retreated into my dark dry place where no light or sound is transmitted. A place I knew too well. A place where no one should go twice let alone ever.

When it was over I asked if he was happy with himself. He didn’t understand how I could conceive of what had just happened as ‘rape’.

I left.

Days later, still disagreeing, we met to talk. He said he couldn’t take responsibility for doing something he wasn’t ‘capable of doing’. That he ‘couldn’t have done it’ because he ‘wouldn’t do something like that’. He told me I had made things up. I was the girl who cried rape.

The night before he left me—like the miraculous but false hope that a sick man will get better just before he dies—he wrote me a letter about how he wanted to support me. He said he wanted to help me escape the sea of glass I felt I was swimming in; an ocean composed of promises, broken into a million shards after the lesser men I’ve known grew fed up and violently discarded them.

He wanted it to work, he wrote. But then he left.

And now, two years later, he was still not willing to meet me in the deep dark place. He said, “take care of yourself” in the secret hope that we wouldn’t meet a third time. He was on his way.

No matter if he’s (or she’s) introduced you to his family, if he tells you he’s in love, if he buys you presents and makes you laugh—even if he listens to you cry and holds you in his arms—the words “NO” “PLEASE STOP” and “DON’T” may not reach him. And he may deny ever being a participant in a non-consensual act, because it can be easier to put oceans between you and another person than it is to atone for actions you are scared to admit are your own.

Not all villains wear masks. They don’t all cackle. Sometimes they are the people that are closest to you. If they do not find the ability to empathize and agree to meet you in their mess, they will compile evidence against you. And they will name these bits of evidence, one by one, bringing your world to a firm halt word-by-word, sip-by-sip from their paper cup in a noisy midtown coffee shop.

Be firm. Defend yourself. And despite the naysayers, whoever they think they are, I believe you. They may rest on their pedestals, but I will meet you in the mess. Your voice and your opinion matter, and you will find empathy in me.