Sinan Writes This

Living With Complications

They don’t tell you what life will be like as a grown-up.

I’ve spent the night round my mum’s house for the first time in 5 years. I can’t sleep. Just keep thinking about stuff, very annoying. So I’ve been browsing through some of the crap that’s still here. Some of it’s a treasure trove: an old Final Fantasy IX soundtrack. Others resurrect painful memories: a photo of a cute girl I lied to when I was 14, ruining our relationship irrevocably. Old university books from a degree that hasn’t brought me a lot of good. Photos of a younger, far more innocent me, one who didn’t know how the world could be a dark place.

Browsing through Facebook tonight I came by chance across a name, one I hadn’t seen in quite a few years. It was the name of a person who raped a close friend years ago. I know it, he knows it, and many people know it. And yet he walks free.

I remember when I first found out all those years ago. The friend, she didn’t want the police involved at all, so I considered taking matters into my own hands. I mulled over violence – for some time – and then harassment, and then possibly making it public knowledge. In the end, I realized it wasn’t my place. Well, more accurately, I came to accept it wasn’t my place. I felt I had to, very begrudgingly.

Some months later, I saw him. Slouching against a wall in a bar. I wanted to kill him. It’s the only time in my entire life I’ve felt so powerful a hatred, so pure a desire to end someone’s life. I didn’t even trust myself to punch him. Instead, I quietly told him to leave. He did. After that, he skulked into the shadows.

But at some point people move on, and clearly the shadows have less hold over him now. He is on Facebook. He does not fear, and he does not wilt.

Maybe he is happy. Is that right?

As I lie in this bed, on the mattress I slept on as a child, I ask myself when it all got so complicated, and when a man thought it fair to do something so vile. It leaves me cold and lost – and helpless. Even now, I wonder if I could’ve done more. Was I right to let him go? Should I have made it my place?

They say those who do wrong will have to live with the guilt of their crimes for the rest of their lives. What about the victims? If I, just a bystander, recoil so just from seeing the bastard’s name on a website, it crushes to think what my friend must go through each and every night because of what he did.

Life was so much simpler once.