June 30, 2024:
The apparatus of evil collapses into pettiness. "His pettiness fit you like a second skin": evil revealed as the flattering costume pettiness wears. Neither of them is evil. They're small, where "evil" is the word smallness uses to feel large.
She calls him evil because she thrills to his smallness. "The willingness to inflict egregious little hurts," because "he did openly" what she wanted to do.
But truth is both harder than that and more generous. The real reality, "lost in the noise": her "burden of seething and legitimate anger."
The misused word "evil" is a vehicle, the "transparent carrier", projecting onto that petty man her own need for redress against a world that had actually wronged her. The word is see-through: you can look through "evil" to the reality behind it. It's legitimate rage seeking targets.
She is not evil. She is small, and narcissistic. Her pettiness was unempowered reaction to real harms, legitimate harms. None of which excuses what she did, to others and to me.