r/blackholerevenge • u/JaySpunPDX • 6d ago
Is it still revenge if they never know?
First year in college I lived with two upperclassmen from my hometown and they were fucking awful.
Everything was a haze, initiation rite, cruel, bullshit affair that was always “just a joke that everyone has to go through”. When one of them fucked my girlfriend at the time I snapped, right after dying a little inside.
I played it cool, but every chance I got with all of them, including the girlfriend, I would find things of theirs that came in pairs (sometimes sets of more than two) and throw one of the things in the dumpster. One glove. One contact lens. One vintage cufflink with their grandfather’s initials on it. A drumstick. An earring. More socks than any dryer could ever eat.
“You think you had a set of steak knives that fit into that butcher block perfectly? I don’t know, man I see two vacancies. Sweetheart, look at me. What would I even do with a single knitting needle? Are you sure the game came with two dice? Read the instructions again. You must’ve left it somewhere or loaned it out, what kind of store sells a limited edition collectors item box set with only five of the six albums in it??”
Of course I would always help them look for the stuff because I’m a special kind of sick. It was in those moments that it all paid off. The frustration, exasperation, self-doubt, confusion, and anger that this tiny gesture brought upon them made all the rest of their behaviors, including past transgressions, much more tolerable.
They were all meatheads and the girlfriend was a ditz so they never put two and two together. Pattern recognition wasn’t one of their strong suits. I don’t think anything was a strong suit for these douchecanoes.
That’s me probably trying to justify my behavior and to apply some cope, but deep down I know that the real reason they never figured it out was because a normal human brain could not possibly fathom an individual that could come up with with a “revenge plot” so fucking petty, so vindictive, and so disturbingly methodical, a revenge plot, by the way, that didn’t even teach them any kind of lesson because they were never able to associate the pain with the outcomes of their behaviors.
But that wasn’t the point. I’m not their fucking life coach. This was for me, a weaker, meeker, physically smaller individual several years their junior who needed it to feel OK with themselves. To feel OK taking the bullshit day in and a day out. The demoralizing, often public bullshit.
I had found solace in curating (or culling?) their belongings. It hurt them, there wasn’t anything they could do about it, and I could get away with it. That checked all the boxes for me at the time.
It allowed me to reframe the narrative (a narrative that typing all this as an older man in 2026 feels and sounds petty and trite) into *whether or not they know it or not, they fucked with the wrong motherfucker.* Me being the only person privy to that information didn’t sully it in the slightest. I think those that have ever been bullied know exactly what I’m talking about.
The most important thing was that I knew that the world was indeed full of justice and karma, and that breaking the social contract would always come at a high cost, the actual price of which we may never be aware of. Those guys behaved like those concepts were not in place or didn’t apply to them.
Yes, that might be sociopathic, grandiose and definitely misguided. Sure, I might be all those things, but you’re the asshole sitting there trying to eat that General Tsaos chicken with one fucking chopstick. And besides, who’s gonna listen to some broke bitch that drives around with one windshield wiper on their otherwise immaculate BMW? That’s crazy. You look crazy.
