Emily Vance Brown

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the concept of forgiveness. Who we forgive, and why, and maybe more importantly, how. If I say out loud that I forgive my father for his absence or my mother for only ever wanting a mother herself, does that make it true? Does forgiveness have to be felt to be envisioned? 

Mostly, when I think about forgiveness, I think about August 2023: a sticky summer night, sweating over hibiscus ginger mocktails at a table at Radio Coffee. I have always run hot, I told her, and she made us switch seats so I could have the one closest to the fan. We spoke in French, in innuendo, and she held my hands across the table and said, “I don’t believe in coincidences.” 

I wish I’d told her, “I do.”

Her apartment, my apartment, her grey couch, her body weight on mine, my faded velvet quilt. 

Her body weight on mine. 

When I think about forgiveness, I think about the crying–oh, the crying–and the disgusted look she gave me, and the questions I didn’t answer, and never will. 

“Have you never had sex before, or what? What’s your problem? We already talked about consent, didn’t we? Are you a virgin, or what? Have you not done this before? What’s wrong with you?”

And me, open-mouthed on the bed, thinking, if she killed me now, I probably wouldn’t even mind. I’d probably let her do it. I probably wouldn’t mind at all.

In the end, it wasn’t the thing itself, or the reversed-role stories she told our mutual friends, or the screaming in the parking lot at Cherrywood Coffeehouse the night I confronted her. 

Oh no, no, no–the thing that almost killed me? That was the goddamn Hinge ban. 

Everything else happened to someone else. Someone far away, in a book, on a movie screen. Everything else was a story I had heard before. Everything else was a story I could tell someday to a future friend or lover, or to myself, or to a therapist somewhere down the line. 

I spent hours on the phone trying to talk to a representative (no one ever called me back), I wrote novels out of email drafts (met with an automated “Thank you for your feedback. We are reviewing your case”). In a fit of furious desperation, I made a complaint to the Better Business Bureau, which is there, on their website, even now. 

I cried alone in my room, alone in the car, alone in HEBs and hipster coffee shops, alone in the apartments of friends I was catsitting for. I remember cradling a cat named Kiwi with a little kiwi charm and bell on her collar while I laughed maniacally, sobbing, “But it was me! That was me!”

I drove for hours every day, in a loop. South down 35, up Lamar across the river, east down Airport, back to 35 down Cesar Chavez. I listened to the Front Bottoms and I cried. I listened to Stevie Nicks and I cried. I listened to sweeping orchestral symphonies from movies I forget the names of, and when the violins swelled, I shouted: “I don’t understand. I don’t understand. I don’t understand.”

There was never really anything else to say, not anything else that mattered, not even after a year and a half of dragged-out written exposure therapy where I told the same memory of the same sequence of events over and over and over and over until it no longer felt like my story, in fact, it no longer felt like anyone’s story at all, just some jumble of nonsense on a page. 

Nonsense. I used to tell the whole thing like I was a suspect in a crime drama, giving my statement precisely down to the last detail, desperate to prove my innocence. “Then she said this.” “Then she touched me here.” “Then she went down the stairs two at a time. She almost tripped on the last step, but she didn’t. She was just fine.”

Two weeks after the worst second date of my life, a gay man came to stay with us. One of my roommate’s college friends. Tall, blonde, stereotypically angelic. The first thing he said when he met me was, “If I could be reborn as anyone, I’d come back as a lesbian in her 20s in Austin, Texas.” I wept, and it frightened him. I forgave him his fear. He didn’t understand, and I sure as hell couldn’t explain it to him.

She had me blocked on everything by then, and I never heard from her again. I like to think of this as the one genuinely kind thing she did for me. I thought about her every minute of every day for the first year, and now, I’m happy to report, I rarely think of her at all.

Except for when I’m on a first date, or a second, or I’m swiping on an app, or flirting with a pretty butch at the club, or trying on someone else’s glasses, or sitting outside at a bar, or–

Well, anyway. 

If you ever make it up to Oregon and you meet a girl named Claire–petite, pixie cut, curly hair–I hope you tell her I don’t mind. I don’t forgive her, not yet, but I don’t mind. If she has to drag my name through the mud, if she has to lie and lie and lie until the lie is just another version of her truth, if clinging to her switched-up story helps her sleep at night–no, really, I don’t mind. We all do what we can to survive.

And as for me? I’ve been sleeping just fine.