I do.

While I was on my walk yesterday for some reason I thought about Walker (fake name). Why him after all this time? I don't know, I guess because I realized I wasn't so far from his home. Maybe because I had just had a conversation about him with a mutual friend who was still friends with him. Maybe because I'm trying to do all this work on forgiveness and forgiving myself and getting past stories and seeing people as people. Because that's what we are, no matter how we try to demonize someone else. We are people who are doing what we know to do. And sometimes we do what we do because we don't have access to doing it any other way.

Laura and I sat in her living room until late Monday night and talked. She suggested I get a notebook and write down stories that come up and then forgive. Not like POOF but like celebratorily let the stories vapor into the nothing from which they had come. At least they would be the hell out of me. And if someone got a free pass, so what. Bye bye.

Maybe that's why Walker came up. I still have stories about him that come up from time to time and that I accidentally see him every so often doesn't help. I held hatred for him. Hatred for myself for being inside of his slow water drop of abuse. Even now, I'm letting it go. For myself mostly. For myself only. Perhaps he comes up in my head because I have been having such trouble sleeping the past few days. Big trouble sleeping. I am even having trouble being sleepy. Fuck! I get like this sometimes. I can literally go days without sleep. Anyway as hard as it is to get to sleep I remember by the time I would finally drift off I would feel him undress me. I hated that. Or if I was already naked then feel him trying to enter me while I was asleep. I hated that even more. Even more than that I hated that he knew I hated it. Hated how he spoke down to me. So many years have passed and I have used hate so many times in this paragraph. Then I hated his shock and awe when I left.

He did what he did. He did a lot of things. I did some things too. I didn't love him. Not like that. But I stayed. Not long, but one day is too long to stay with a person you like well enough but not love, but continually say that you love. He knew. Maybe there was this part of him that felt I owed him sex in the precipice and dead of my hard to achieve slumber. In retrospect I don't think the fights were ever about sex, but about my no. How fucking dare I say no.

He did. I did. Whatever we did we did. Not TO each other. I can human him. As I human myself.