I Can Confirm That Payback's A Bitch

I've been unpacking memories, as they say, with my new therapist. Lately my thoughts turn to my being a bad person. All of the things that I've done that make me twinge with shame. Surprisingly these are not my more recent transgressions, like this entire blog where I unload (pointedly) about my family. This is my coping mechanism.

Things I really do regret are things I did in the past -- drawing on peoples' faces in yearbooks, for example. I actually spend real time worrying that things I did to get a laugh will appear in Ancestry.  Anyhoo, I did something shitty while I was in middle school. A girl in class was bugging me and I retaliated by cutting her down in a very personal way. After that day she and her friends spent the next few years following me, doing things to me and generally making my life miserable. It only stopped when, in the locker room after PE one day, she confronted me and I locked eyes with her while trying to find a weapon I'd stashed in my binder. Luckily for both of us I didn't find it, and she eventually yelled "Don't give me them eyes, Bitch!!"

My kindly therapist asked some probing questions after I'd told him that I'd often thought of trying to find her to apologize. We're all grown ups now, and I wanted to let her know how very sorry I was for pain that I had caused her. The therapist wanted to know what was stopping me, and the answer is usually (cause I think of this a lot) that if the pain was still fresh I do not feel that my apology would be helpful. I'm still kinda confused about it all.

This weekend I looked her up. I wasn't expecting to find her because she had a common name and also chose different nicknames over the time that I knew her. But I did find her. And her fb feed is almost entirely filled with memes about how if someone crosses her she will not reveal where she hid their body. I told this to mrguy and he thought I was exaggerating until I performed a recitation of dozens of the memes found in her profile. 

I have decided not to pursue this idea of an apology any further.

I wish her well. I hope that it's all a put-on and that she isn't really that angry. I still regret that I said that thing to her. And if we ever come face to face again I guess I'll have to give her those eyes. Or run.