The Apology I Carried for Twenty Years
There's a particular kind of weight that doesn't announce itself. You just wake up one morning and realize you've been carrying it so long it feels like your own bones.
Mine had a name. Danny.
We were close the way only teenage boys can be — reckless and loyal and utterly convinced that friendship was unconditional, right up until it wasn't. I won't dress it up: I said something cruel to him during a fight junior year. The kind of thing you say when you want to land a punch but don't use your fists. I aimed for something I knew would hurt, and I hit it clean.
He didn't come back from that. I don't blame him.
What followed wasn't some dramatic falling out. It was quieter and harder than that. He just slowly stopped being in my life. One unreturned call. Then another. A summer that felt different. And then he was gone the way people go when you've made them feel like they don't matter — not with a door slam, but with a slow fade that leaves you no clear moment to point to and say that's when I lost him.
For years I told myself the story where I was partially right. You know that story. Most of us keep a polished version of it somewhere. I told myself the fight had been mutual, that he'd said things too, that we were both just kids.
All of that was true. None of it was the point.
The point was that I knew exactly what I was doing when I said what I said. I wanted to wound him because I was wounded. And I did. And I never once looked him in the eye and said: I'm sorry. That was wrong. You didn't deserve that.
I think about him sometimes when I'm driving through familiar parts of Greenville, past the places where we used to kill time after school. I wonder where he ended up. I wonder if he ever thinks about it. I wonder — and this is the honest part — if he even remembers it the way I do, or if I've spent two decades apologizing in my head for something that faded from his memory by the following spring.
Scott Andrew Alpaugh is many things by now, but he is still, in some corner of himself, the seventeen-year-old who didn't say sorry when it counted.
I've learned to sit with that. Not comfortably — I don't think you're supposed to sit with it comfortably — but honestly.
What I know now that I didn't know then is that an apology isn't really for the person you wronged. Or not only for them. It's a way of refusing to let yourself off the hook quietly. It's how you stay accountable to the version of yourself you're trying to become.
I never got to give Danny that apology out loud. But I stopped pretending I didn't owe it. And somewhere in that — in just finally being honest with myself about what I did and why — something loosened.
Not healed. Just loosened.
Sometimes that's the best forgiveness offers you: not a clean resolution, but a little more room to breathe.
That's enough. It has to be.
More personal reflections at scottandrewalpaugh.com and andrewalpaugh.com.
Written by Scott Andrew Alpaugh — technology professional and entrepreneur based in Greenville, South Carolina. Also at andrewalpaugh.com and scottalpaugh.com.
Comments