I still think about you.

Our paths never crossed again, not since then. It’s been decades now, that blue and beautiful day that seemed so full of possibility.

It was the day that you raped me.

How could a man let that happen to them? Those were the unspoken words I heard for years.

You were bigger than me. Older. You’re still older, but I’m probably bigger now. All grown up.

I was eight. A man in my own eyes. In yours, too.

There’s a lot about what you did that I don’t remember, but one I do: that you told me to play pretend, though a different kind of pretend than the one to which I had become accustomed. Pretend that you had come home from work, as you pressed my face into the pillow of your bed.

The years went by. Sex terrified me for a long time. The body rendered a geography foreign to me. Invisible scars that I bore, from which I would find ways to recoil when someone stumbled upon them. I made those choices, and those choices led to other choices, and to still others.

It’s not all your fault, either. My choices were mine.

Sometimes I fantasized about tracking you down, killing you. Some kind of bargain I could win with a pistol and a lack of better better ideas.

Sometimes I forgot about you all together.

Mostly I minimized you. If I convinced myself most of all that you hadn’t hurt me, then you wouldn’t have. That I could go back in time, undo the things you did to me.

I was fine.

But was I ever?

Tennessee Williams once wrote that time is the furthest distance between two places. As I write this, I am no more than ten miles from where our paths crossed — and yet, if that was on Earth, then here I write. Dispatches from Mars.

Did you move away? Are you still here?

Are you happy?

Do you have a family that cares for you?

A job that fulfills you?

A God who loves you?

I hope that you do.

Did you hurt anyone else?

Did your father do to you the things you did to me?

I hope you wonder about me, in the same way I wonder about you.

You set this thing in motion. My life. Pain and beauty and heartache. Wins and losses. Dumb luck. Strange as it sounds, I wonder if you’d be proud of me.

Do I call you a rapist? A child molester? Am I a victim? Or a survivor? What have I survived? What am I surviving?

I’ll call you by your name. Like you called me by mine.

Do you still think about me?