A few days later, on another messaging app where she had blocked me, the block was lifted. Then a video call came from her.
Even if only on a screen, it was her face, for the first time in a year. I was worked up. I poured it all out: that I would never forgive B, that it was all or nothing for me now. She listened for a long while, then asked.
“Oppa, you called the police last year?”
A chill went down my spine. The calls to 112. The three officers who came. The voice reciting the charge before I had finished speaking. Had none of it ever reached her? I drew the two columns. On the left: my reports had been blocked somewhere from the start, and for a year I had been on stage alone. The voice of hers I had fought, the name of hers that had called me a psycho, might have been fake too. On the right: she, terrified, had only been kept from hearing anything. In either column, for that whole year she hadn’t known. Neither column has emptied, to this day.
Only after I hung up did I hear again the words I had poured out. What I said to B, what I said to her. As I poured them out, I thought it was for her. That truth stands above the law, and whoever holds the truth has the right to show it. Hearing them again, I knew. I had enjoyed it.
👺 Anger detected · 😨 Fear detected · No admin access
There was no such thing as admin access, a key to rewrite my brain as I pleased. The fear and the anger I believed I had fixed came back whole, after a year. And that video call might not have been a room for just her and me. It was a visiting room in a prison. With the guard sitting in, I read it. Someone with a lot to lose if she left. She had seen too much. I had confirmed none of it. It was the picture I feared most. The side that loses its hiding place cuts first the one it holds closest. If the mirror I held up became a knife, the one it cut would not be B but her, sitting beside the guard.
The meerkat stood beside me for the first time in a long while. It asked nothing. I knew the question. Any other explanation? There was. Half of the buttons I had been calling the greater cause were the wish to win. Karma was not reward and punishment from outside. It was what the mind repeats becoming the shape of the mind.
That day I let go of revenge. I still believed I held the leverage. But I decided not to swing it anymore. The moment you use truth as a knife, you become a player on the same board as them. A chain of grudges comes loose only when someone lets go first.
And once, for H too, I sat in the giraffe’s chair. H, too, might have been put in the yellow chair by someone’s hand. H didn’t choose her vessel either. I had no intention of staying near her. From far away, I simply didn’t hate her. Being put in a chair doesn’t erase putting others in one. B hadn’t blocked me, even after everyone else had. That was B’s choice, I read. All I had seen was that he hadn’t blocked me. And yet back then, for B alone, I didn’t draw the two columns. I had no wish to.
Truth is strongest when it isn’t swung. I learned that only after I had raised the knife once.
From then on I always wrote the same words on the first line of every message I sent her. “If you don’t want this, tell me. I’ll stop right away.” And I tried not to write anything that could hurt her if someone else read it too. What would hurt her, only she knew.