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This is the story of me ruining someone’s life, but then finding out years later that that’s not actually what happened.

In The Things They Carry, Tim O’Brien writes extensively on the limitations of memory, how malleable the nostalgic narrative arc can be. Two people’s experiences of the same event are rarely the same, and years later, the way they remember them may render that same event completely unrecognizable. I was reminded of these sentiments last weekend when I called up an old friend I’d wronged and asked him to tell me in detail all of the awful things I had done to him.

It’s a long story that would read too much like a Gossip Girl script, but in short, Alex was one player in a series of relationship mistakes I made over eighteen months of my college life. The mistakes began with Daniel, my sophomore year boyfriend, and ended with Alex and the third figure in this story—Zach—driving his car into a wall at 50 miles an hour with Alex in the passenger’s seat. The three men were friends, and through what I can now only chalk up to something akin to female witchcraft, I managed to make those eighteen months as painful and messy and upsetting as I could for all four of us. I have a cruelty inside me that mostly lays dormant, and is on the whole a subconscious part of my personality, but at times it rises to the surface and wreaks havoc in ways I can’t comprehend until months afterward. In this instance I had fallen in love and gotten my heart broken by Daniel, then strung along his best friends, Zach and Alex, to a point where we were all literally going insane. That is, at least, how I perceived the narrative of those eighteen months in my own mind.

When I call Alex he is on a Metro platform in Washington DC, and sometimes the trains whizzing past him grow so loud that I have to repeat my questions three or four times. This is especially awkward considering the nature of the queries. Things like, “Do you feel like I ruined your life? Do you think it was all my fault?” etc. Alex is gracious in answering them, careful to never say anything too mean, even when I prompt him to let me really have it. In my mind—and perhaps this is just sheer masochism—I deserve to hear things like, “You’re a complete fucking bitch.” But I come to find that in Alex’s mind, the story played out completely differently.

I ask him if he felt I used or manipulated him at all. “I don’t know,” he replies. That isn’t at all the answer I expect. I thought he might take some delight in the fact that I was finally setting myself up as a punching bag for him after everything I’d done. As always, Alex is sweet. “I think both of us were sort of careless with our friendship,” he says. “I don’t feel that you ever wanted me to think that you liked me as some precondition for being supportive or being a part of my life. I don’t feel that you were ever trying to lead me on in that way.”

Throughout the conversation, Alex uses the word “nebulous” a lot to describe our relationship at the time, which I think apt. For eighteen months it was as if we were perpetually on the verge of orgasm: in terms of every interaction—intellectual, flirtatious, friendly—we were constantly bringing each other to the edge and then stopping dead in our tracks just before tumbling over.

He also seems to remember Zach, his other best friend and someone with whom I also had a “nebulous” relationship, as the main perpetrator. In the Spring of 2009, on the last night that Alex and I talked for almost a year, he and Zach went on a bender like every other Friday night. But that night, Zach crashed the car into a wall at 50 miles an hour, shattering his leg and sending Alex into shock. I received several frenzied phone calls that evening, because they were both drunk and maybe even emotionally unstable.

Terrified and feeling personally responsible for everything, I called my ex Daniel at 3 a.m. that night and told him that he needed to handle the situation. It was just too much.

“I can’t deal with this anymore,” I said.

“You shouldn’t have been dealing with this in the first place,” he retorted, and promptly hung up.

When I ask Alex about Zach, I can feel the anger in his voice begin to rise. “He was lying to me, and I felt like you were the reason he was,” he said softly. “I felt like you were telling him to lie to me.” This is the closest Alex gets to saying something markedly negative about me throughout the entire conversation. He’s quick to add, “The negativity from that whole situation was mostly due to Zach. It was him who drove me into that wall, not you.”

He laughs, and there is a pause.

“I do like the Jules and Jim reference that you made awhile back. I think it was very fitting.”

It’s late and I have no idea what the hell he is talking about. I picture the British show “Jules and Mimi” that Miranda on Sex and the City relates to while in an interracial relationship with her hot black neighbor.

“Jules and Jim?”

“Yeah, the Truffaut film.”

“Ah, right.” While abroad I took a French Cinema class and became pretentiously obsessed with old French movies like The 400 Blows.

“When you were living in Paris you called me frantically one night and said that you had just seen that movie and realized that Jules and Jim was the story of us,” he says.

It’s fitting, if only because the melodrama we wrapped ourselves in for that year and a half should’ve stayed on Truffaut’s screen. I’ve been living with the narcissistic, guilty memory that assumes my actions impact people in life-altering ways. In my mind I had wielded the ability to destroy Alex, but by the end of our conversation I find that he was smart enough to have never even given me that power in the first place.

He laughs again. “It was late there and you were talking about the movie and how it made you realize that you were going to drive me off a bridge if you didn’t let me go,” he says. “I liked that sentiment. I thought that was very poetic.”

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