What He Gets to Leave Behind

There is a difference between something ending and something being over.

On paper, what happened to me has an ending.

There was a process.

There were years spent in court.

There was a sentence.

Four years of fighting. Four years of having to tell my story again and again. Four years of carrying everything into spaces where it had to be explained, questioned, and made legible in ways that never fully captured what it actually meant.

And in the end, he received two years of probation.

Two years.

That is what accountability looked like.

From the outside, that might read as closure. As something that has been dealt with, completed, resolved.

But that is not how it works.

Because while that process ended for him, it did not end for me.

He gets to move on.

He gets to continue his life without carrying this in his body. Without being reminded of it in the same way. Without having to navigate the physical, emotional, and ongoing impacts of what he did.

I do not have that same separation.

What happened did not stay in the past.

It lives in my body.

It lives in the pain I continue to experience.

It lives in the ways I have to navigate spaces that should feel safe but do not always feel that way.

There is something deeply difficult about knowing that the consequences are not shared equally.

That one person can complete a sentence and move forward, while the other continues to carry the impact indefinitely.

That harm can be treated as something with a clear endpoint, when in reality it continues in ways that are not always visible to others.

I think often about what accountability really means.

Not just in legal terms, but in lived experience.

What does it mean when harm is ongoing for one person, but considered finished for another?

What does justice look like when the body still remembers, when the effects are still present, when there is no clear line between past and present?

I do not have a simple answer for that.

I only know that there is a disconnect between what systems recognize as an ending and what it actually means to live with what happened.

He gets to leave it behind.

I do not.

And that is something I continue to carry, even as I keep moving forward.