You Are A Coward; The Tale Of One Punch

Photo by David Crausby

The following is a story about a girl named Jennifer and a man named Ryan.
While it is fiction, the tale is all too true.

…

I remember when I first met Ryan. He’d just graduated from university and worked for an accounting firm in the middle of the city. They treated him like shit and late at night I’d tell him to quit. “It’s not so bad,” he would say, smiling like he always did. He never complained, even after the worst days. He’d come home and make me dinners and stress about whether or not he’d put the right amount of salt and pepper in. Sometimes when I couldn’t sleep, he’d ride down to the store and get me terrible magazines that would put anyone to rest. In the morning, he’d make me coffee and ask me to give it a score out of ten. A five at best, I always told him eight; he tried so hard. He would smile and kiss me on the forehead and then walk me to my car and tell me to drive safely. He was a gentleman, Ryan. That never changed.

As time went on nothing wore thin. I wanted to keep things exactly as they were. Every night before I went to bed, I would pray. I’d always say the same prayer because what I wanted was clear. I’d pray for good health for my family and friends, happiness for acquaintances and eternity for Ryan and I. After awhile, Ryan began to pray with me. He’d sit next to me and bow his head and when we finished he’d hug me for even longer than he usually did. I don’t know what he said in his prayers, but I know he did it for me as much as for him. Ryan was selfless like that.

Things got better and better. Ryan and I moved in together after three years and my parents couldn’t stop smiling. Every time we talked they begged me to bring him over for dinner and offered to cook his favourite meal. He’d always act excited even if I knew he wasn’t. He would bring my mum novels from her favourite authors and give dad expensive bottles of scotch I’d never seen before. Ryan never wanted anything in return; he just wanted to show them how true it all was. “Don’t ever let that boy go,” my parents would jest at the table. When we got in the car to drive home, Ryan would say how much he loved me and how happy he was to be a part of my family. I’d hold his arm while he drove and think about how lucky I was.

Ryan was almost perfect, but to have flaws is to be human. He was struck with a kind of illness. It was an illness that many men with something to prove hold inside of them. He suffered from that innate male inclination to prove they’re strong, powerful, dominant. He loved to drink a beer faster than his friends and any hint of sport made him painfully competitive. He wasn’t as bad as some, but he did have that alpha mentality coursing through his veins. When his group of guys went out on the town, he wasn’t the same person that cuddled me early in the morning and brought me breakfast in bed. Thankfully, he wasn’t a fighter like some of the other men he knew, though perhaps that weakness defines them as boys. I always told him that not fighting was one of his most attractive traits. “Never,” he would assure me.

…

It was maybe ten in the evening on the night of our fourth anniversary. We’d been drinking with friends all day and we decided to call it a night. Ryan was outside making a phone call when we left a pizza shop. We walked outside and by the time I knew what was happening I could see a man lying in the gutter. His body started to convulse and I wondered if that was what dying looked like. I watched his forehead turn red and the gutter follow suit. I remember commotion and Ryan being yanked around the corner by people I recognised. He didn’t look like the man I knew anymore. I couldn’t bring myself to leave the man lying in the gutter alone. I tried to scream help but the words wouldn’t come out. I lay him on his side and my fingers turned white trying to hold him and stop the shaking. Eventually his body lay still, but it wasn’t my doing.

I didn’t have any defense for Ryan when the men in blue and white came. I watched him thrown to the ground and I cried and cried and cried. I cried because of the phone call a family, a girlfriend, a teacher, would get. I cried because I couldn’t bring an innocent man back to life and I couldn’t answer why he was gone. I cried because someone I knew had done something I couldn’t understand. That night I looked Ryan in the eyes and felt something I’d never felt toward anyone in my life. In retrospect, I’m sure it was disgust. I watched him thrown in the backseat of a police car and when the car door shut, so did the rest of his life.

…

Ryan’s three weeks in now and the shakes have stopped. I’ve only seen him twice, but the second time I saw more life than the first. I think he’d finally sweated out all the alcohol and come to terms with what he’d done. He doesn’t eat much anymore and he tells me that sleeping is almost impossible. All the nightmares and stuff. I do my best to smile at him but I think he knows how hard it is. I don’t want to stop seeing him but I can’t even look him in the eye anymore. I glance at his face and that night flashes before me. I remember his snarl, the undiluted aggression. I remember the finality of a thud and his complete disregard for another human’s life. I remember everything and I wish I remembered nothing, like he did. I wish he’d humanised the stranger before he threw that punch.

Routine’s become his existence now. He cries ten or fifteen times a day and wishes his parents would answer his calls. He wakes, eats and sleeps at the same time. He tells me it’s good for him but I know this time good came too late. Even if we could we wouldn’t have sex anymore; the intimacy left forever the moment he had blood on his hands. He dirtied our world and I won’t ever be able to tell anyone why. I know how hard it is for him but I can’t force myself to care. All I think about is how hard it is for everyone else. Then I stop myself thinking; it hurts too much these days.

I’m about to see him for a third time and I feel guilty but I shouldn’t. This time will be the last. I feel like I shouldn’t see him anymore. It feels like I’m supporting something I don’t believe in. I love Ryan – the man I was once with – but that’s not who’s rotting away in a jail cell. The Ryan I knew isn’t the person who caused all this, but the two can’t be separated. Mum tells me that sometimes people have things inside of them that take a long time to crawl out. It took until that evening for Ryan to show me everything and I wish it had been sooner. It’s hard to stand by a murderer.

I said goodbye to Ryan for the last time and saw the regret in his eyes. I went home and I sat at the end of my bed to pray, but it wasn’t like the other times. I didn’t pray for my family or my friends or for Ryan. I didn’t pray for forgiveness, because acts of cowardly malice shouldn’t go unpunished. Instead, I prayed for a human, a man with a name. I prayed for a man with a best friend, a girlfriend, siblings and a mum and a dad. I prayed that God would give that man everything in heaven that he missed out on in life. I prayed that he was in a happier place.

…

One punch can kill. Stop the violence.
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Written by Sammy Attwood, the co-founder of Your Friend’s House. He can’t use Twitter, enjoys brunch and occasionally posts things on his Instagram account.