Around this time

I was not seeking this key because I had decades of practice avoiding looking at the lock. The evidence is plain that I could not stop from discussing my life in molecular detail then, but I did not even allude to an expurgated version of the night for nearly a decade. Looking back at my entries from the beginning, I could not understand why I had gone so long without mentioning Melissa before landing upon the reason: I wanted nothing to do with her because she had sexually assaulted me.

Melissa used to host occasional hotel parties, paid for by the credit cards that she had stolen from her parents. These parties occurred to have a place where we could be outside the eyes of "adults." They smoked out of the windows of nonsmoking rooms, drank, and, once, played Risk for hours. I did not go to many. Little was going on at them that seemed to apply to me as a nonsmoking teetotaler who didn't like competitive board games.

Once, though, Melissa got the room for late winter access to a swimming pool.

I was unaware of this possibility when Melissa picked me up that night, so I did not bring a swimsuit (nor might I still have; I did not love going publicly shirtless). I snuck through the lobby, even though she had paid for the room. Hotel management rightly did not want ten twenty-year-olds in a single room.

I met Angela for the first time that night. She was quirky, plainly intelligent, and Jewish -- in other words, my type then. She also had a boyfriend serving time in jail, so I did not flirt much. (I gently prodded Angela recently to see what she remembered that night, which was nothing, to my relief.)

Angela and other guests went down to swim. Melissa likely wouldn't swim even in private, hating her body, so we intended to hang out in the room until the swimmers returned.

In our friendship to this point, I had been alone with Melissa innumerable times -- though usually within a few rooms from parents -- so perhaps it was the setting that made her decide to do this. She did not have the excuse of alcohol or drugs at this moment, surely having nothing in her system more pressing than nicotine. Shortly after everyone left, she was on top of me without preamble, trying to kiss me as I jerked my head away, her hand forced down my pants as I struggled to play it off and make jokes to get her to stop. I was anxious, throwing up every excuse expected of a woman in that situation: I didn't want this, people might be back any minute, maybe we should check out the pool. She did not care and did not relent.

I only had to fight her off for a few minutes until she pushed me away, falling into sullen self-pity that I could want to do this with women I didn't know well but not my best friend. She felt entitled to have sex with me and wanted me to feel awful that I would not give into her.

How could she think I would want this? She once mocked me for having once said that I wanted to save myself for marriage because the idea of sex made me so nervous. My sexuality had always been oriented toward wanting a long-term commitment, never on sex itself. I had kissed several people early into knowing them, but I would not have done anything like this with anyone.

I escaped before anyone else could get back and guess what had happened, fearful of what she would tell them if I remained to taunt. Melissa may have offered to drive me home, but I told her that I wouldn't want her to miss hanging out with her friends and assured her that my parents would pick me up, though it was midnight or later. I considered walking home, a distance of four miles, rather than bringing another person into my humiliation -- they couldn't possibly know that Melissa had forced herself on me, but what if they somehow did?

It was wet out, as though it had just been raining. I shivered, but it wasn't from the cold. (I am shaking even to write this.) I wouldn't wait inside the hotel lobby, fearing that one of her friends would see me or in case Melissa would make a scene when I wouldn't return to the room.

My parents could not have been happy to pick me up then, but one of them did and did not make too big of a deal over it. Since I had called them from a payphone in the middle of the night, they assumed I had a good reason.

I refused to talk to Melissa for a month, though she kept calling, each time grating on me further. I cannot promise that she understood that she had done something wrong in trying her damnedest to force me into sex, only that it made her feel bad that I was ignoring her. She never had healthy sexual boundaries -- the men she chose did not always care about her enthusiastic consent -- but I assumed I was exempt. I believe that I was the one person whom she would not try to corrupt, even as she boasted of selling fake drugs to middle schoolers. She would delight in helping men cheat on their wives and girlfriend because it made her feel wanted to have been briefly "chosen" over someone else.

It was not my fault, what Melissa had done, but I still felt overwhelmed with guilt. I did not want to tell anyone what had happened -- and indeed didn't for decades. If I cut her out of my life then, she would have told everyone she could about it, making herself sound like the aggrieved party to get back at me for rejecting her friendship. My reputation as a serial monogamist was well-chronicled and discussed among friends and exes. I doubted anyone would have found me blameless here, not as a young man with over a dozen ex-girlfriends of some duration. I could not bear what had happened being a part of my history. It was better to hide it than deal with people debating whether I asked for it or deserved it. Better than having people ask me if I was so debased and wanton that I didn't fight harder.

I knew that if I had a girlfriend, Melissa probably wouldn't try this again. I am not suggesting this made up the more significant part of my almost frantic attempts to date around this time, all of the actions for which I have criticized my younger self these months of review. My attempts had preceded Melissa's sexual assault. It did make it direr to waste no time in damage control and, in effect, pretend it hadn't happened.

There were a few other times in the subsequent years when she made me uncomfortable, where I thought she would try again, but it was never outright an attempt. She would put on porn and try to get close to me or touch herself until I made an excuse and left, she would make sexual jokes that went too far, but it wasn't like her on top of me in a hotel room while I had a panic attack.

True to my assumptions, she did back off once I was seriously dating someone. I don't think she even cared that night that I was the person under her. It didn't matter that I was supposedly one of her best friends. I was in the hotel room and alone with her, so she wanted it irrespective of any further context. Her assault bordered on impersonal.

A year ago, I finally told someone -- though I had put together that night's fuller effect only days ago. The person I had confessed to, a woman who barely knew Melissa, responded almost the worst way possible: invalidating it, saying that I was wrong and that I shouldn't say that Melissa had done this. I was stunned at the reaction that my lived experience, this trauma I had to cover up, was nothing against her prejudices. Men did not get sexually assaulted like that. It made me snap shut until realizing that I had to post this if I was ever going to get any catharsis. Twenty years later, five after Melissa's death, what she tried to do still causes me to feel a sickening, saddening punch in my side.

Would I have ended up in the same uncomfortable sexual situations after this if it had not been for Melissa sexually assaulting me? Probably, but not definitely. I have kept few secrets in my life and tried not to look at this one for so long.

I would not have been brave enough to write this if she lived. She would have berated me for it, denying everything, spinning it until I was in the wrong. It is ironic. She would have been the first to scream how we should believe the victim and coldcocked a sexual assaulter -- especially one trying to hurt me -- but she would have gone scorched earth on me for admitting this. Being alive would not have made her more mentally stable or able to acknowledge her culpability. She would never have apologized to me or, if she did, mean it, only justified how she was right and I was overreacting.

After Emily left me, Melissa brought up her assault attempt. Not to say she was sorry, but to throw it in my face for not wanting to consider sleeping with a friend as a rebound. I felt the horror anew that she would use this secret against me. She said something like, "What, are we pretending that didn't happen?" Yes, damn it. I spent a decade pretending that it hadn't happened so I could live with myself that I had relented to speaking with her again. Instead, I told her that it "didn't count" because I couldn't face it. I told a lie in writing and blamed myself again rather than confronting her.

When she died, in all my grief, I felt a tiny knot untie that she would one day decide to divulge it to someone. Writing this now is burdensome, as I am doing what I dreaded from her all this time. Smacking me with this was cruel, but no one could call her on her cruelty without her taking it to extremes to try to make them apologize to her.

This is not to speak ill of the dead. I have been frank about Melissa's flaws and how I still felt about her. I don't know that I repressed that night. I was aware that it had happened, but I didn't face it. It wasn't my fault, but until now, I never wholly stopped feeling in part culpable for what she had tried to do. I had tried to placate rather than fight. I didn't grab my bag and flee the room the second that she pushed me down and started groping me.

I cannot forgive her for this because, in life, she did not and would not seek it. She was a scorpion and was only acting in her nature-shame on me for thinking that she wouldn't use her sting against me. I am trying to forgive myself for keeping the secret, letting her off the hook for my pain, and allowing this lock to grow dusty but never rust. I have to allow myself to be honest about it finally.

I am finally allowing myself to feel the echoes of that truth, look it in the eyes, and call it what it was.

(Dearest reader: Do I want to talk to you about this more than I have above? I do not. Thank you. I have had a long conversation with both Melanie and Amber, who helped this angst ease enough that I could post this.)

last watched: Moon Knight
reading: Guns, Germs, and Steel