There is a midpoint in a woman’s life where she is no longer a little girl and not quite a young woman. This is a remarkable period of her adolescence, a moment where she is coming into her own, yet still moored to childhood innocence.

It is a vital time, a last step to the first steps of adulthood. The age, 15 or 16, is not as important as the journey itself. We marvel at this flowering period. It is the stuff of poetry, of literature and art.

A time filled with joys and sorrows, of banalities and whims. A time of laughter and boredom, experiment and self-indulgence, the fine art of wasting time due to an over-abundance of time.

What do we call this time when everything seems possibile, death is unreal, and freedom is not yet an illusion? Youth? Perhaps. Is it not better to call it a living dream?

In one brief instance that must have felt like an eternity, the sexual assault and attempted rape of young Christine forever shattered this dream. It was an attack, not only on her body and mind, but on the animating spirit of her young remarkable life.

Gone. Ripped away from her by the drunken privilege of shallow, unremarkable men. Men, yes, not boys. Their eyes already accustomed to seeing the next conquest, the gateway to a privileged life where rules exist only for lesser men and do not apply to the elite.

Gone. Ripped away from her. Christine wasn’t saved at the last second by the stumbling antics of two men ready to take turns gang raping a young woman. A part of her died that day, on that bed, in that room.

Gone. Ripped away from her. The living dream.

This is not a moment of victory or defeat, nor a time of self-congratulation. Whether or not Kavanaugh is confirmed on the Supreme Court will not bring back young Christine. This is our loss as well as hers.

For those finding comfort in the passage of time, this too is an illusion. I can assure you, with the all the power of physics and the weight of reality behind it, that young Christine is still there, in that moment, petrified, dying on that bed. Her physical existence is as real as you and I are today, flesh and blood, forever trapped inside that terrible moment. And for her, there is no absolution, no last rites, no hope of salvation.

This is what we are asked to forgive. This is what is called youthful indiscretion. The banality of these words, a cold contrast to our remorseless evil.