We must rewind to see how I got here.

We must rewind to the glaring, too-bright, yellow-green lights of the PATCO train.

To the walk down a darkening Arch Street in the chill of a March evening. To my shoulders, draped in a white lab coat on weekdays, draped now with the heavy suede of his jacket, the sleeves hanging far below my hands and flapping against my knees as we walk, the streetlights blurring before my eyes, the lights of the bar where we’d met several hours earlier growing dimmer in the distance. 

Let’s rewind further to the shots of Jäger he insisted I do despite my protestations that I was not a much of a shot girl. To him, handing me the glass and goading me to try it, his buddies behind him, urging me on, because, in his words, it “tastes like purple.” To me, it tastes like Dimetapp. They all circle around me, and I am holding court, the unlikely object of their attention.

Rewind a little further to my emerging from a stall in the ladies room and finding him there, grinning in a more menacing way than he had out at the bar, pushing me against the cold, tiled wall and kissing me forcefully. Here is where you will say, why didn’t you know then? Where were your instincts? And here is where I won’t have an answer that will satisfy you. I was drunk? I didn’t want to make a scene? He was a friend of a friend? Would any of these answers satisfy you? Probably not, because they don’t satisfy me.

 Do you have more questions? Do you want to know if I kissed him back? So do I.

Rewind all the way to the beginning of the day, to me, walking into the sparsely populated Irish bar, all dark mahogany and dim lighting, even at ten thirty in the morning. Zoom in on me, a walking juxtaposition, a bespeckled, bookish blonde with a Barbie doll body, clad in jeans, a navy zip up sweatshirt, and blue Payless sneakers, eating a bowl of Irish oatmeal—the first and only food I would consume on this day—and sipping a glass of Dogfish Head 90 Minute IPA. I am looking for no one’s attention, but somehow, I have attracted his. Watch as he materializes next to me, his jeans brushing mine. Do you think I’m intrigued? Attracted to him? You’re not wrong.

He is the tall, tan, human embodiment of a redwood tree. His nose is crooked—perhaps from a rugby ball to the face, perhaps an elbow—but his smile is straight and Colgate commercial white, framed by the parenthetical laugh lines of someone who smiles easily and often and with confidence. Someone the opposite of me. He tries to explain what’s happening in the rugby game on TV—the one I’ve been invited here to watch by friends I’ve now lost track of—and he says he is rooting for England because he’s English, but with a name like Colleen, I must be Irish. I walk right into it. I say, “I have a little English in me.” He says, the grin spreading slowly across his face, “I’m going to make a really bad joke now.” He says, “Would you like a little more?”

Are you exasperated when I laugh even though his remark makes me slightly uncomfortable? Are you flabbergasted that I could have missed such obvious foreshadowing? So am I. 

We arrive now at the moment in question. This is the moment where my eyes open and struggle to focus on the cracks in my shitty, eggshell white apartment ceiling.  This is the moment, on the living room sofa handed down to me by my parents, that I become conscious of him moving inside me, the moment where the slow, cold panic of realization spreads across my body and I somehow summon my voice from the pinned down pit of my stomach to rise through my trachea, somehow summon my lips to move beneath the stubble of his jaw and force out the words, slurred and hazy and more whisper than protestation, “Hey, wait a minute.” He does stop. With a grin that now calls to mind the Cheshire Cat of Alice’s Wonderland, he says, “Oh, I guess we forgot something.” He thinks I mean he should put on a condom. My mouth is dry, and my mind is a gelatinous fog, and I don’t know what I mean. 

All this rewinding has gotten us no answers.

Let’s fast forward through the part where I wriggle out of the jeans and underwear that are around my ankles, where I stand up, bottomless, and lead him to my bedroom where I have condoms in my nightstand—safety first, for I am nothing if not a sexually responsible adult—and where I consent to him completing the act I had not consented to in the first place. Let’s fast forward through that because my motivation is confusing to me even now. Because I don’t know what I was thinking, except isn’t this what I expected when I invited a stranger back to my apartment? Did I invite him? Onto the train? Into my car? Into my home? I don’t remember, but at some point, I must have. I must have expected this. Except I had probably also expected to be conscious. 

But let’s also fast forward through the act itself, because I don’t remember it. It’s possible I enjoyed it, or parts of it. The next morning, he interprets the raw, red trails my fingernails left on his back as proof that I had. He emerges from my bathroom to show them to me with pride before he pulls on his white undershirt.

Let’s skip the part where we have breakfast at a diner and I drop him off at the train station, grateful he doesn’t ask for my number, because I am confused about what even happened between us and whether I want to lay eyes on him again. 

Let’s skip ahead a few months later to me at a different bar with the same mutual friends I had been meeting to watch the rugby tournament. Here I am, still bespeckled, moving my way through the crowd to the bar to order my friend and myself a couple of beers, when I feel someone’s body pressing against me, trying to occupy the space I am in, and I realize it is him. I am dwarfed by his presence. His back is to me, and before I can decide if I should say hello or hide, he gestures with his hand to the friend he is talking with, and hits me in the mouth with the neck of his beer bottle. He doesn’t notice. No one notices. I swallow the pain silently. We don’t speak that night, and I never see him again.

Fast forward now to the next morning when I wake up alone in my bed with an ache in my mouth and go to the bathroom mirror to locate the small, almost imperceptible chip in my tooth.

We could end here. We could fade to black on all this ambiguity, but let’s press on. Let’s fast forward four years, to me in a car with my husband and our infant son, running mundane errands on a mundane afternoon. We are stopped at a light and half listening to the Kavanaugh hearings on NPR. My stomach drops and my skin goes clammy as Christine Blasey Ford describes in detail what Brett Kavanaugh (allegedly?) did to her on the night in question. Something in her words, in this thin, small voice emerging from this educated, accomplished woman, stirs the long buried discomfort of the encounter that I had filed away as a one night stand borne of my poor judgment. The memory had been buried in the recesses of my brain, a VHS tape collecting dust in a basement. Blasey Ford’s voice pressed play on the tape. The cracks in my ceiling, the weight of his body are suddenly a humiliation so visceral that my forehead breaks out in sweat and I have to force back the bile in my throat.  I stare at the dashboard. I say to my husband, “I just remembered something I haven’t thought about in years.” I say, “I think I’m going to be sick.”

When I tell him the story, his knuckles go white on the steering wheel.

Switch scenes to later that night, and zoom in on me alone on my living room sofa, my husband asleep, the baby asleep for now. Always a night owl and now plagued by postpartum, anxiety-induced insomnia, I sit in the darkness and scroll on my phone. I open Facebook. I find him. He is easy to find, his last name so unusual that I still remember it, though he never told me. I found it on his driver’s license when I woke before him the next morning, found his jeans on my sofa and went through the pockets looking for clues about the stranger snoring in my bed. Here I am, years later, still sleuthing for clues.

Facebook informs me that he now lives in Colorado. In his profile picture, he stands shirtless in front of the ocean with his arm around a pretty, tan brunette. He is still tan. His nose still crooked, his smile still disarming. Somehow, seeing his face again, I feel unsafe in my own home.

The comments beneath the picture congratulate him on his engagement.

It’s about time, his friends write. Congrats, dude.

I don’t wonder if he ever thinks about that night in my old apartment; I’m fairly certain I already know the answer..

I wonder about her. I feel strangely worried for this smiling stranger.

Did their first meeting go like ours had? Or is she a woman he handled more delicately?

How would she react if she knew about the night I woke up with her fiance inside me? Would she forgive him? Would she think there was anything to forgive? 

Do I?

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Header photograph and artwork by Jordan Keller-Wilson