Before We Were Innocent

by Ella Berman

I think about the last time we were together and the cruel things we both said, knowing they could never be undone.

I could remind her of how badly she’d betrayed me the last time we saw each other, how much we’d wanted to hurt each other back then and how stunningly we succeeded.

I’ve taught myself to be smaller like this—less reckless than I was made.

I’ve spent the past ten years trying to forget what happened, only for her to walk back into my life as if no time has passed at all. The problem is, with a history as complicated as ours, I have a feeling one simple favor won’t be the end of it.

One simple choice I made when I saw not only how the world expected me to behave but who they wanted me to be. So I made the choice to become who I wanted to be instead. Not only did I refuse to be defined by my past for a moment longer, but I refused to be defined by any other human in my life, whether that was a stranger behind a computer screen or my own mother.

People in your life will want to shame you, to keep you in your old habits and dysfunctions because you’re easier to predict that way. They’ll want to keep you trapped on autopilot, an eternal victim of your own trauma, because you’re easier to control that way.

Joni has rebuilt her life on facing this fact head-on, refusing to forget, while I have done the opposite. My entire adult life has been built on the merits of restraint, of treading so lightly that I leave no trace of myself.

“He said that some people believe we choose our parents before we’re born, because they have something to teach us. And that doesn’t always look how you think it will, and it won’t always be a lesson taught intentionally by them, or even in good faith, but whatever we do learn is necessary for our souls to progress.”

And if I had to relive one moment for the rest of my life, it would still be that night: the sense of hope, of infinite possibility, of tomorrow promising to be even better than today.

Joni’s entire alibi may hinge on me confirming she was at my house three hours before she actually turned up, but we both know firsthand how little difference there is between lies and the truth, how either can be distorted at any point to fit someone else’s agenda. The only question that actually matters is whether or not I trust Joni.

“You should know better than most that not everything can be solved. Sometimes your entire fucking life catches on fire for no reason other than to remind you of how fragile it all is. How little control we have over any of it,” Joni says flatly.

We sounded frivolous at best, mercenary at worst, and maybe we were. But show me an eighteen-year-old saint, and I’ll show you a liar.

I remember wondering for the first time whether Ev was as insecure and hungry for attention as the rest of us, but where Joni was loud and brash, and I was primed and calculated, Ev just hid it behind acts of servitude and got to disguise it as selflessness.

How entitled for her to believe she could control everything in her life, including me. How dare she have tried to humiliate me like that, implying I was insane for ever thinking I was good enough for her perfect brother.

“Listen to me,” she said again, even more urgently this time. “It’s the only way. We have to pretend that this has happened right now, this very second, and that we were all together. We were walking home, and Ev just tripped. She was climbing down the rocks first, and she fell.”

No questions asked, just an eye for an eye. Blind support in return for blind support, regardless of the consequences.

Emotionless isn’t the same as numb. Emotionless isn’t the same as willfully disassociating from the real world because it’s too fucked up, too illogical for you to even try to comprehend.

“The book’s about the choices we make every day, often without realizing it,” Joni says, her eyes flicking over a table of contents she must have already read a hundred times. “And how if these choices are only made to avoid some imagined worse fate, we end up losing trust in ourselves. And, you know, self-trust can be a slippery fish to win back.”

“You were so scared we were going to fracture that you broke us first,” I say. I watch as Joni’s face crumples, and I think she knows that I finally see her.

Sometimes we could be cruel for sport, yes, but most of the time we hurt each other to hide our own gaping wounds. To find out not just if we were enough for each other but if we would ever be enough for anyone.

But we were all fierce in our own ways. We had built fortresses to protect ourselves from our parents, our classmates, the world, before shyly inviting each other in by the front door. We loved each other more than anything, but the flip side of love isn’t hate—it’s the power to destroy. We were experts in each other’s weaknesses, blind spots, barely healed wounds, and, very occasionally, we used this insider knowledge to hurt each other.

Maybe Joni was right and life is about being fucking terrified and still showing up and turning yourself inside out because you know that loving someone gives them the power to break you, but that maybe, one day, you might just be lucky enough to stumble across another human who recognizes you exactly as you are and who will spend the rest of their life learning how to strike a match to fill your darkness.