What I wanted, it turned out, was not to make them freeze.

It was to get warm.

And those are not the same project at all — in fact they pull in opposite directions, which is the thing almost no one understands about revenge until they have stood where I stood.

Making someone else cold and making yourself warm feel, from a distance, like the same act, like two descriptions of a single victory.

They are not.

To dedicate yourself to making your enemies suffer is to build your life around them, to keep them at the center of your days, to organize your time and your attention and your money around the project of their diminishment — which means that years after they have hurt you, you are still letting them run your life, still giving them the starring role, still living in reference to them.