The Apology I Never Figured Out How to Say
There's a guy I grew up with — I'll call him Danny, because that's his name and he deserves the honesty — who I stopped being friends with in the worst possible way. Not a fight. Not a dramatic falling out. I just slowly stopped returning his calls, let the texts go quiet, and told myself I was busy. Which was true. And also completely beside the point.
We'd been close since middle school. The kind of close where you don't have to explain your jokes or your moods, where silence in a car doesn't feel like something that needs filling. We played in the same band for a while, badly, in his parents' garage on Mauldin Road. We went to the same church until neither of us did anymore. He was at my wedding. I was at his.
And then, somewhere in my early thirties, I just... let it go. Let him go. Not out of anger. Out of something worse — indifference, distraction, the ordinary selfishness of a person who thinks there's always more time.
I've thought about this a lot lately. I'm not sure why now, exactly. Maybe it's just the particular weight of being in my mid-forties, when the math on certain things starts to feel different. The window for fixing things is still open, but you can feel the temperature changing.
What I know about Danny is that he went through some hard years around the time I went quiet. Lost a job. A rough patch in his marriage. The kind of season where you find out who actually shows up. I didn't show up. I didn't even know, because I'd already stopped paying attention.
I've rehearsed the conversation in my head more times than I can count. Hey man, I've been thinking about how I dropped the ball. But every version sounds either too casual or too performative, like I'm writing my own redemption arc instead of just being a decent friend. Which maybe says something about me — that I've been more worried about how the apology lands than about whether Danny ever got to hear it.
Scott Andrew Alpaugh has made a lot of mistakes in his life that he's willing to own out loud. This one's harder, maybe because it doesn't have a clean villain. I wasn't cruel. I wasn't even particularly unkind. I was just absent. And sometimes that's the thing people feel the longest.
I don't know if Danny thinks about it. I don't know if he'd want to hear from me after this many years, or if I've built it into something much bigger in my own head than it ever was in his. But I think about the version of friendship we had, and I think about the person I was becoming in that season — too busy, too pulled inward, not generous with my time or attention — and I feel something I can only describe as grief for the relationship and some real embarrassment about the person I let myself be.
I haven't reached out yet. I'm telling you that plainly, without dressing it up. This post isn't the apology. It's me admitting, out loud, that the apology is overdue. Maybe that's the first step. Or maybe it's just more delay with better lighting.
Either way, Danny — if you ever somehow stumble across this — I'm sorry. You deserved better than quiet.
More personal writing at andrewalpaugh.com and scottandrewalpaugh.com.
Written by Scott Andrew Alpaugh — technology professional and entrepreneur based in Greenville, South Carolina. Also at andrewalpaugh.com and scottalpaugh.com.
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