Last weekend, Steve and I went to see the new Jodie Foster film The Brave One. I’ve been feeling so strangely about my life, Wendy’s death, dealing with violence, that I had mixed feelings about a movie where a woman’s response to trauma is to pick up a gun and begin killing baddies. The mixed feelings were that while I don’t support murder and violence in the least, there was a part of me that took an infinite amount of pleasure in watching bad people die, and liked the fact that a good person just had enough and decided 1) to not live her life in fear, 2) by any means necessary. My feelings became even more mixed as I found myself wishing that the bad guys Ms. Foster cut down had suffered more before they died. That somehow their deaths were just too easy for the evil that they committed and the darkness in their souls.

It was a really difficult movie for me to watch for so many reasons, some obvious to you, Readers, and some only obvious to those who know me very well. At the end, the feeling I was most overwhelmed with was the desire for that bitch who killed Wendy to be dead. To be burning in hell. To fucking suffer.

Then I realised that her life in prison must be far worse than any torture that I could inflict on her, even though I would relish in the act. In fact, it must be torture being in prison. How many times has she been beaten up by inmates or guards? How many times has she been raped? How many days has she been kept in solitary confinement? I figured there must have been a lot of these. Along a whole fucking shitload of time to think about what she did to Wendy. What she did to all of us. And I don’t feel even a shred of sympathy for her, not an inkling of compassion.

Even keeping her prison life suffering in mind, I still wish that gangmember cuntrag was dead, and I am happy she is in pain. Because all of us are still suffering, and we always will be. She has given us seven years of pain, and I am glad I was the one to give her pain too. I’m glad it was my testimony that sentenced her for life. She has given me a lifetime of pain, and I reciprocated.

It’s a fine line between justice and revenge. I believe that her legal incarceration was not justice, but my revenge. Jodie Foster’s actions in the film were not revenge, but justice. Life always finds a way to balance things out.

Like The Bride says in Kill Bill: “When fortune smiles on something as violent and ugly as revenge, it seems proof like no other that God exists, and not only does He exist, you’re doing His will.”

Amen, sister.