We were all students of a small music program on a private lecture, which meant that I was the last person to know. I stepped out of a violin recital and checked my phone on the way to the reception where my colleagues and parents were waiting. My friend had sent me pictures of her with my friend on a recent camping trip. I thought back to the last week, my boyfriend tore his hiking shoes and told me how excited he was to take our future children together who camped together. And now, on my screen, the reality of his journey: two of the people I had loved more and trusted more than everyone else, kissing under the bright hot sun.
In the following days, friends, acquaintances and even professors emerged. Everyone, it seemed, had seen them together in the library, bent heads too close, or with their hands too tightly understood in a rehearsal room, his car parked on her street on successive nights. I was stripped, not only because of the private violation, but by how public it all turned out to be.
I left the apartment that I shared with my boyfriend and moved with a number of people I knew, but peripheral. He also moved – in the apartment he had kept in secret. But it wasn’t enough. I felt a constant and deep feeling of shame. I have a reminder of collecting my violin from my locker and the eavesdropping on friends discuss the situation; It was old news for them. I started to avoid the campus and stopped interacting with most of my friends, the feeling that I could not trust anyone. I started drinking excessively and visiting strip clubs – very much out of character. I wanted to leave my body, enter the body of someone with whom this would not have happened.
A week later I was surprised how easy it felt to forgive him. I gave him his post and did not feel bad will. I suppose I was socialized to expect this kind of betrayal from a man. But the betrayal by one of my best friends was something I was completely unprepared about: the grief, the inability to understand, and the slow and horrible realization that I still loved her.
I had just finished reading the Napolitan novels of Elena Ferrante, and Ferrante’s image made of a world made and run by men, but also rejected by women inspired me: what if I did not allow the world to pull us against each other? What if I didn’t have to lose her?