The Men I’ve Killed with My Boundaries
Survivor’s guilt gets complicated when your abuser dies.
Trigger warning: This piece mentions emotional abuse, reproductive coercion, suicide, and sexual assault.
A year before he died, my rapist emailed me saying he was suicidal. A girl had just dumped him and he was spiraling. He’d relapsed on heroin. He was miserably alone and the only person he could think to contact was me.
While my rapist and his girlfriend were together, he’d largely left me alone. That had finally given me the brain space to reckon with what he’d done. Before that, I’d just considered him a friend who had ruined a perfectly good fuckbuddy arrangement by getting greedy. In the silence and solitude, though, I reflected on what had happened, and stopped calling him the comedian in my mind and instead deeming him my rapist.
My rapist’s girlfriend had made him delete our old Google Chat logs and texts. Now he was single again, and lonely, and he wanted me to return all those digital mementoes. He said they might make him feel less like killing himself.
I was entirely happy to oblige. I gathered up the old chats from when we were involved with one another, and pasted them into a big word document. I backed up old, flirtatious phone messages we’d exchanged using the site…
