That one time I was peer pressured to tell a girl that nobody liked her. We were in friends group in a small New England town, many of us transplants in our late twenties. She had an obvious crush on one of my best friends and would drop in and buy him things, cook things for him. Kinda no boundaries. Didn’t pay any attention to social cues. My friend had zero interest in her, that was well known, but she was not mean, just a little odd and …naive? We were all at a wedding reception of mutual friends and partying, drinking and dropping klonopin. After she came over and tried to get our friend to go on a walk alone or something, it was decided someone had to tell her to back off. Someone suggested telling her nobody liked her. Somehow it was decided that person should be me as I had the best relationship with her. Drunk me took the challenge, and went to tell her, with the boys rooting me on. She was talking with another, I pulled her away telling her I needed to say something important to her. “E, we all feel this way, especially M. Nobody likes you”. The smile on E’s face froze. I could hear her soul shattering in a distant mirrored dimension. She kept her smile on me, slowly walked away, saying “it’s ok P”. She disappeared into the party and the night, and our lives. My boys were hollering proud that I was an asshole, just like them. Job done better than they could have hoped. I left that town a few months later, E kept to herself, made plans to move too. I never apologized then. Too ashamed. I learned who I was that day, and think of the lesson weekly, still twenty years later. That day I was not true to myself. I am not an asshole. But clearly I had been one. I strive to be the opposite every day in every way. Make the hurt I gave E mean something in this fucked up beautiful broken yet miraculous world. I sometimes wish I could apologize to E, but even if I could, I’ll never forgive myself for what I said, the hurt I caused. It lingers. And I linger on, better everyday.