January 9, 2007

  • for some time now, i've been carrying around inside of me the notion of writing something along the lines of a long letter of apology to the world.  the idea took form as i looked back over the mostly pedestrian landscape of my past, dotted here and there with peaks of happiness and pockmarked uniformly with disappointments great and small.  though i'm already taking too many liberties, imagine taking a pen to the map of such a surface, and then connecting the dots in chronological order, but also sometimes by category.  you may object to the looseness of the metaphor.  all i wish to convey is this:  i'm not sure what the process involved, other than that it involved my memories of happiness and disappointment, and some sort of ordered analysis; all of which ended in the notion i've been harboring to write the letter of apology mentioned above.

    i looked back upon the most passionate moments; examined all the catastrophic failures; ruminated until the foggy vagueness of memory had been reduced to crystalline thought-shards of the finest grain imaginable.  and in the end, it seemed quite clear that, time after time, i had been stupidly overpassionate; the catastrophic failures had been mine alone; the happiness had always been a gift from others.  in short, i felt apologies were in order.  it was too clear a pattern not to recognize, and employed as a guiding theme, it led me to see all my preceding life as a jumbled mass of missed apologies.  either i hadn't apologized when i should have, or else i long-since owed apologies to all those i should have been thanking along the way.  and as i bumbled forward, often in time alone and no other dimension of progress, i could see that this would continue as a matter of course.

    i still haven't sat down to actually write the thing though, because really, it's not a writable letter.  this far removed from the events for which i should have either expressed more gratitude or else apologized, the words themselves would be meaningless.  worse; read by anyone other than those to whom i owe the sentiments, they would only become ingratiating and insincere; further cause for more letters to even less reachable recipients.

    but i've still been carrying the idea around of this grand letter that grows day by day, despite helping to reduce the further incidence of such neglect.  for all the unintentional pain i've inflicted on others, for all the pain i felt in revealing and admitting that to myself, misunderstandings and moments of unintentional neglect still plague my every day of existence.  and as its necessary length and the number of days it remains unwritten grow, i find myself filling up with the idea of the letter, leaving room for so little else.  yet, it does not constitute a burden.