When Pigs Fly
The First Apology, and hopefully not the last.
It was a day like any other,
gym doors looming in front of me,
the torture and lactic burn about to begin.
But unlike other days,
I sat with both hands on the wheel,
going nowhere,
staring through the windshield
not knowing I was about to receive healing instead.
On this day, the unimaginable was about to happen.
A man was about to apologize to me.
And he was going to do it well.
None of the stories specify that the day pigs fly
will be a Tuesday.
We ran into each other, physically,
followed by a “hey, we should talk”.
Which, in most instances is not a great sentence to hear,
especially from an ex.
I have a cabinet of files
for the conversions that started with
“can we talk?”
I’m sorry if…
I’m sorry but…
I’m sorry you took it that way…
But this apology had bones,
And sat up straight in its folding chair.
This one was directed to my government name,
with a Dear You, and Sincerely, Me.
It wanted nothing back, shockingly.
No forgiveness or redemption points or pat on the back
for doing the bare minimum of decency.
It all happened a decade ago
we “dated”, though the term is generous,
as it generally was back then.
Our frontal lobes in late-stage formation,
mentally undercooked
and emotionally under-qualified for romantic dalliances.
It was the blind leading the blind
in a masterclass of reenacting childhood wounds,
mommy and daddy issues center stage.
Both trying to get the other to meet us where we needed to be met
only to be dragged through the mud of misunderstanding
with every late night text.
We weren’t terrible, exactly.
The mess was messy in a mutually fun and disastrous way,
two people confusing intensity for intimacy.
It was all I knew, and he knew it.
Then a decade of drift in a million-person city
that keeps introducing you
to the same five ghosts of situationships-past.
That day, bracing for nostalgia,
or a my therapist told me to tie up loose ends,
so here I am, holding a little knot.
I got pigs with wings.
and a truly believable “I’m sorry.”
I’m sorry for how I treated you.
I’m sorry for how I showed up, and for when I didn’t.
I’m sorry I couldn’t communicate.
I’m sorry that what I did communicate was painful.
I’m sorry that my ego was loud
and my humility was silent.
He said: my patterns were driving,
and you were in the passenger seat,
and it hurt you,
and I see it now.
I knew you were vulnerable.
He is in recovery.
Long-term.
Measured in years and not days.
Accumulated days
of dollar coffee and accountability.
And so am I, however brief, so I know a tenth step
when it looks me in the eyes and apologizes
even ten years after the wound was inflicted.
The tenth step means the counting never stops.
That the books stay open.
That honesty is a barber shop you sweep every night,
not just when the state is coming in the morning.
The wound was no longer fresh when the apology happened
But the promptly of Step Ten
starts whenever you finally see it.
Inventory runs on the timeline of your seeing,
and this thing took a decade of Tuesdays
to come into focus.
The step only asks
that when the light hits it,
you don’t shove it back into the shadows.
There is a gap.
A gap between the woman you are
and the woman you perform to the world.
The performance being:
I’m fine.
This doesn’t hurt me.
I don’t care what you said, did, didn’t do, and how you didn’t care.
I’m okay to be forgotten.
It’s alright that you moved on.
The unadmitted harm
lives in that gap,
the inch of story
where you come off okay,
where it was complicated,
where you were both so young.
He walked ten years
back into that inch of story
and apologized for all the things unsaid
and asked for the same in return.
So that I could feel the gap close
the way you feel a plane land:
in your bones,
before you believe you’re back on solid ground again.
I wish I could tell you
I drove home grateful.
But I drove home grieving.
Thirty-three years old,
counting every man who was careless with my heart,
counting every apology that never came,
counting every heartbreak with no resolution.
And then the grief turned around
and pointed me to where I have been in his shoes.
I keep an inventory too.
A little black book of bad behavior and apologies never said.
A list of people who met the version of me
with her communication signals down
and her ego blown up.
People who got nothing,
when they were owed my amends.
I have been Mostly Honest
about that era of my life, and all the eras since,
which means the last inch
is still held close to my chest,
and some of it belongs
in conversations
I have not yet had.
I will not perform them here.
They belong to the people
who are owed them.
Recovery, whether you are in it or on the curious side of the fence,
is the confession, the testimony, the Mostly Honest-ness of:
Be seen.
Survive it.
Repeat.
Forever.
And stay sober.
Somebody always has to go first.
He went first, and it did not kill him.
Now I am telling you, and it is not killing me.
And somewhere down the line of dominoes
there is a junk drawer in your house
with a conversation in it, waiting to be had.
The step does not ask you to be finished.
It asks you to keep counting,
and to say the true thing
the moment you can see it.
Ten years counts as promptly.
So does tomorrow.
So to that man, who will probably never read this,
thank you for keeping your books current.
Thank you for being the first.
I hope you’re not the last.
