I don't eat at dinner. I think I swiped some fries from someone's plate. I drank three of the sorts of cocktails I always order, those elderflower-heavy gin and cucumber potions you can find for twenty bucks at every chi-chi cocktail bar on the planet. I get very quiet, and very drunk.

Nobody really noticed. Nobody really cared. This was the circle of friends that included the rapist - and he is there, a few seats down from me. A tactical error, doomed from the start. 

Dragon Age 2 is a game about kindness.

The world isn't kind to you at all. You lose your home, twice. You lose your family, again and again. You can't make it through with all of your friends alive and on your side. 

The world hasn't been kind to them either, and as you carry on your day-to-day life, it isn't the big things that stand out. 

BUT I DONT WANT TO WRITE ABOUT KINDNESS RIGHT NOW I WANT TO WRITE ABOUT RELATIONSHIPS SO I'M THROWING MY RELATIONSHIPS PART DOWN HERE SO I DON'T FORGET IT!!!

Dragon Age 2 is a game about relationships. 

And there are others. People bring me food, drinks, hand-me-downs. They invite me out. They keep inviting me out. 

Remember, these people haven't known me that long. And they've mostly seen the worst of it. A few weeks of bombastic invincibility and then a crash? Come on. I'm the weird friend, the crying friend, the friend who keeps alluding to something bad without ever saying it outright. I've lost mutual friends, but there are others - the ones who never much liked my rapist in the first place - and they close ranks around me. 

One of my friends has a new apartment. It has a fireplace. We have parties there so we can burn shit. At one of these parties I get so overwhelmed that I go into his bedroom and lie down on the floor.

After a while, he comes in. He lies down next to me. We don't touch. 

"I have really bad depression," he says. "The only things that help are weed and taking long runs in nature. Let me know if you ever need some weed or someone to run with in nature." 

I demure, politely. My parents raised me with good manners. 

One of my work friends calls me at my desk. "I was sitting behind him on a flight this week," she says. "I didn't realize until we'd landed. Otherwise I would have kicked the seat the whole time."

"That's nice of you," I say.

"I mean it. I would definitely have kicked his seat [for you][the floor of the party]."  

I can't talk about what the months following being raped were like without talking about the unnecessary kindness that my new friends - some of them - offered me.

Listen. There is so much from that time that has vanished from my memory. I'm playing archeologist to piece it back together. I'm reading through old google documents, texts, photos. I've scrolled all the way down on my twitter. I've reached out to friends, like "Remember that time I completely snapped right after graduation? Can you remind me of what that was like?"

I put on some sort of gorgeous dress and gorgeous eyeliner. The grief has given me a sort of consumption chic, with my eyes always super-wide and super-sparkly. Because of the crying. 

Also, I've had a lot of time to practice doing my makeup while I was busy not leaving my house.

There's a big party of us. We're Ubering to the other side of town where someone has a dinner reservation. We'll eat and drink, and then the plan is for all of us to go to some party or another. Ring in 2016 with some sort of intention. 

[I have a different plan][gin]. 

The sun rises at 7:30. 

It sets at 4:30. 

I get up somewhere in between. Take the elevator from the fifteenth floor to the basement garage, drive to work with the sky so low and heavy that it feels like a wool blanket - like a literal wool blanket. Thirty minutes to the underground, unheated parking lot at work, then the elevator to my windowless office. 

You keep living in [the city][Kirkwall] where [the bad things][Winter] happened. 

Madison is a small city. A quarter of a million people. The isthmus is even smaller - less than a mile from lake to lake.