How was it that I never dreamed of telling you what he was doing to me? I thought of you as the sort of friend with whom I could share anything, yet I never even considered telling you the one thing that might have made a difference in my life to have shared with you, with anyone.
Of course, at the time, because of his manipulation, I didn't think of it as "what he was doing to me," but rather as what I was doing with him. Even with all my resisting, his physically isolating and sometimes overpowering me, I still thought of myself as a co-conspirator with him in cheating on my mother. My crushing shame confirmed that illusion for me, and it was what kept me silent, indeed from the most fleeting entertainment of any option other than silence.
It isn't for your sake - and especially not for "ours," as we've both long since become fully confident in the decisions we made about the relationships for which we were meant - that I wish I'd told you. But I certainly regret what it ended up meaning for me that I couldn't, and the role that my long-term silence and shame played in what I subsequently became, in part because I never really dealt with this even when I did finally tell someone.
It would be easy to feel that there remains a wrong in my past that I need to fix by filling in my missing pieces for you. That isn't the right way to think about this, for a lot of reasons. One of the biggest is probably what it would mean for me to approach this weekend with such an agenda with you - and our spouses - ignorant of it. It is inexpressibly helpful (healthful) that I don't feel any compulsion to try to recreate an idealized friendship to make up for something lacking in my life. I have a feeling that it will become obvious if the day ever comes to share the missing chapters of my story with you; if so, it will not be something that I will need to be anxious about.
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