I slapped someone in the face tonight. We fought. I don’t know who was wrong or right of if it matters or mattered. I walked away. I went back. I demanded to be heard. He agreed. I don’t know if it could have been resolved because he made me laugh and offered a solution, so I smacked him. I had half a mind to do it as I approached. It was several months of anger and frustration on my part directed toward him which may or may not have been deserved. He didn’t slap me back. He didn’t yell. He didn’t really react. I said ‘I meant it’ and I did. I said ‘it wasn’t right but I can’t take it back but you know that’. I stayed with him for a while more. I didn’t apologize. It happened. I told him why I did it. He said, ‘if I had one thing to say, it would be that I’m dissapointed’. I said ‘me, too’.
I’m disappointed in all the hurt and the unfulfilled needs I have from the last few months. He is disappointed that I would give in to the urge to smack him in frustration. Violence isn’t an answer, ever. I don’t feel it was violent — I feel like it was a physical manifestation of all the emotional ‘slaps in the face’ recently. It didn’t hurt him physically; it wasn’t hard enough to hurt. It was that it scared him, was unexpected and all the other things that come with being slapped.
I am not sorry for slapping his 24-year-old face. I am sorry for the 12-year-old fears that I made real again. For the pain that was faded to be bright and clear of a mother and father who hit more than heard. I am sorry I didn’t remember his story until after it happened. I am sorry that I did a thing that would make it hard or impossible for him to trust me; a person who has an exceptionally hard time trusting.
I hurt him. I felt justified in the slap but not in the effect it had on the kid inside and how he views me in his life. I would like to be a person he would trust and be close to but I feel like the age and maturity and communication breakdown and craziness has taken a toll.
I am not looking to salvage all that we were, whatever little that was. I am only looking to do right by that kid because it seems like no one ever did.
