I Remain Very Sorry About What I Did To My Boyfriend's Roommate's Ex-Girlfriend

The following piece was a written assignment for my creative nonfiction writing workshop. It was inspired by Jenny Boully’s “I Remain Very Sorry for What I Did to the Little Black Kitten” on Brevity. A link to find that piece is here. Hope you enjoy!

I remain very sorry for what I did to my boyfriend’s roommate’s ex-girlfriend.

I knew your relationship was crumbling. I wonder if you realized. He had been telling all of us for months that he wasn’t in love with you anymore. He wanted to break up with you, but didn’t know how. After all, two and a half years is a long time to spend hating someone in a college relationship. He told me that he didn’t even like having sex with you—that it was a meaningless chore that he dreaded.

But I didn’t tell you.

I didn’t tell you that I begged him over and over again to rip it off like a Band-Aid so you wouldn’t have to continue suffering a failing relationship. I felt sorry for you because I knew that he was wasting your time. He first claimed that he would break up with you during the summer, but that turned into after your tests. He would end it when he snuck all of his stuff out of your place, but that never happened. All his friends, including me, started making bets about whether or not he would actually end it. We were all shocked when he finally did.

I’m sorry for perceiving the end of your relationship in a fiction story that I wrote about you and him. When you (through tears) drunkenly told me about the abortion you were forced to have, I couldn’t not write a story about it. I wrote about your pain and indecision that you shared in confidence to me. I observed you for weeks during the writing process, documenting each fight I saw you have. At the end of the story, I doomed your relationship with simple lines and tried to make the reader more sympathetic to you. I promise that I never told anyone what happened other than writing that story.

Your ex-boyfriend made a new friend a few weeks before he broke up with you. I believe this was the tipping point. She was just a friend that slept over sometimes and helped with homework. There were no romantic interactions (that I know of) other than he cooked her dinner often because she’s allergic to gluten. I told my boyfriend that I was uncomfortable with this friend being over when he was in a relationship with you. I thought it felt fishy. I couldn’t bear knowing if he was cheating on you. I expected you would have told me if my boyfriend did something similar. They continued to call her a friend in front of me.

That didn’t stop the guilt I felt when you stared at me in class—searching for answers in the lines on my face.

I knew that he was going to break up with you the day he did. All week we had been referring to it as D-Day in hushed tones. I saw that it was your two and a half year anniversary from the post you left on his Facebook wall. I imagine you cooking dinner, hoping that the dreadful feeling that you had wasn’t going to be true. You thought that you could have a healing date night without consequence. I didn’t text you to warn you or check up on you. Maybe I should have rather than comforting him when he returned home with a guilty conscience. Maybe I wouldn’t feel so guilty.

However,

The thing I remain most sorry for though is the fact that I like his new friend more than I ever liked you.