(This Letter is curious in the scheme of things in that I wrote it and actually sent it out to Mike. Yes, it was petty to hold onto the matter for so long, but when you're upset you don't always think rationally. He wrote me a letter which I received on Halloween, but I didn't reply to it until December. *shrugs*)

December 13, 2007

Mike,

It's been a month and a half since I recieved your letter, three months since this whole mess began. I had to let your letter sit for a while, a long while, because I was simply too angry with you for a long time. To be honest my gut reaction was that I should send you a letter and absolutely tear you apart, but I'm glad that I didn't. I told you that I wasn't angry with you; I think I was just forcing myself to don that mask of easy forgiveness and let it be, but that only caused me more grief. By the time Halloween rolled around, I was angry, and it has taken me a month and a half to get to the point where I can even contact you again.

I keep running through the events in my head, trying to figure out why I didn't just push you off of me, why I let you get as far as you did when my every thought was screaming at me to stop you. For that much I blame myself, for not stopping it before something happened.

You said in your letter that you fully understand what you did. I don't think you do, or can. Maybe you understand it in the strictest sense of the term, understand that it can be called sexual harassment or assault, but you do not understand the effect it had on me, only that it had one. You cannot comprehend the full weight of it unless you've experienced the same thing, been used like that. You cannot understand how completely worthless it made me feel to have been so basely valued in your eyes, to have yet another person only interested in me as a replacement for someone else or as an object.

You claim that you really did like me. You might have thought that you did, but you didn't know me well enough to really like me. In reality what you knew was only the vaguest outline of the person that I am. I have to believe that if you liked me, really liked me as a person and not that vague outline or who I seem to be as an extension of Jacki, you would not have done what you did. I also have to believe that, had you really liked me, you would not have told me not to tell Jacki what had happened.

When this happened you didn't understand just how close Jacki and I are. I don't know if you do now. She has been my friend since we were five; she and I know each other well enough that we don't have to hear the other say anything but our name to know what they are thinking. Asking me to betray that bond by not telling her was one of the worst things that you did. Worse, claiming that you really liked me and asking that of me after you tried to use me as a replacement for her.

I'm not ready to forgive you yet, but I'm writing this because I need to get some closure on this. Because that event has shaped my first semester here, and I refuse to let it affect any more of my life here. For now, I don't know how long the road to forgiveness might take, but I can't allow myself to hold in my anger, to pretend I don't see you, to keep acting as if I wasn't wounded by what happened. I hope I can forgive you eventually, but for now I can merely wish you well.

Emily