all apologies

I’m sorry.

That’s all I wanted to say. I’m sorry. But sorry is so much more than a word, isn’t it? There’s a history involved, a conflict, a potential resolution. It’s a word with its own baggage, a heavy word that needs to be carried and handed off carefully. So when I say I’m sorry, I’m saying a thousand words.

Maybe I need to speak those thousand words as well, to relieve the word sorry of its weight.

Ask me about anything that happened in my life from 1996 to early 2006. Ask me. Chances are I’ll stare blankly at you for a few minutes before answering. I’d have to dig my way through the black space my mind has created in lieu of memories of those years. Oh, the memories are still there. The big events, the mundane, the day to day machinations of life are all there, but they live behind a firewall. Turning off that firewall to retrieve the memories causes little shock waves that may take days to dissipate. I try to not do this often because it hurts.

It started with a separation, a break in my routine that — although I’m the one who initiated the break — brought havoc to my life. A downward spiral ensued and my low grade depression became a snowball rolling down a hill, gathering force and magnitude until it was too big to manage. I let it bury me. I let it isolate me. I let it have its way with me.

I won’t say I had a complete break with reality but it was like when you stop dating someone but they’re still hanging around in the periphery. Maybe you run into them at the coffee…