Send

I have made a lot of mistakes in my life and have hurt a lot of people, so I need to apologize and ask for forgiveness a lot, it seems. I am very vindictive and hold a grudge and dispense the silent treatment better than anyone you know, so this is easier with some people and some situations than others, to say the least.

I was estranged from Anna, my best friend who came out to see me this past March, for about a year or so, right around the time I moved from Claremont to Seattle. The reasons for that estrangement were totally my fault but at the time I felt that there was no way I could get that friendship back—for a while I didn’t even know if I wanted it back. It was the worst year because we were still seeing each other at parties and things but I always felt this huge encumbrance between us–so huge and menacing that I thought that I would rather just let the friendship fade than attempt to scale that mountain, to make that peace.

It was one of those summers in my mid-twenties where I was, like, unemployed and had no money and yet was still flying around the country to go to multiple weddings. Our friends Dave and Joey were getting married in Minnesota and Anna’d come back from hiking the Pacific Crest Trail for a weekend to attend. She and I sat next to each other in the church that afternoon and I remember wishing I could sit somewhere else, that I didn’t have to sit next to her and think about what a good time we’d be having if only, if only. The next day there was a post-wedding barbecue/croquet match at a park with a little man-made lake in the middle of it. I don’t know how but all of a sudden she and I were walking around that lake, five six seven times, getting burnt on our noses and talking and talking about our respective years; we didn’t even really know what had happened with each other because the thing between us was so big and awful and unsurmountable. The sun started setting and it was time to go to the airport and everyone was gathered a little way away from the lake, watching us go around and around, when I finally broke down and told her I was so sorry, that I loved her and would do anything I could to make our friendship right again. We were standing there screaming and crying in each other’s arms as it was time to go to the cars and everyone was sort of looking at us awkwardly, like, um, uh, we’re going to miss our flights but I didn’t care. I was so happy to have that friend of my heart back in my heart where she belonged, and where I intend to keep her for the rest of my life.

And then last spring I reconciled with a woman in Seattle whom I had not been able to be friends with for about six years, much to my deep unhappiness. I won’t write about the details here, but I will say that after that first meeting, when we were done, for the moment, with gasping in pain and comparing notes and letting the tears well up and drip into our shared risotto, she pulled me into a strong fierce all-encompassing embrace and said “I’ve missed you.” My behavior..I hate even thinking about it…to her had varied on a horrid spectrum between chilly indifference to outright hostility, and she’d missed me, missed what we could have had together as friends if so many choices hadn’t been made, if so many lies hadn’t been told. I was (and still am) humbled by her courage and heart that allowed her to say that, and realized that I’d missed her too, in spite of everything. My friendship with that woman is incredibly precious to me today, no matter what sides of the globe we are on, and I am glad it was only six years and not seven or eight or nine, and that I can look forward to being friends with her for a long long time.

I did something similar today, with another woman of my acquaintance, whom I’d always liked but not been able to treat well, to my shame. We were never close but maybe we could have been: I always thought she was really cool and felt terrible that I wasn’t able to be friends with her. My heart in my throat, I wrote the email apologizing for something I’d done ten years ago, and I didn’t know how she’d take it and didn’t know if she’d even respond back, but by now I have a little experience in this sort of awful confession, and I knew that for purely selfish reasons I would feel better for having done it. And…well, you know where this is going. I am happy to say that she wrote back immediately and was so happy to hear from me and was glad for the opportunity to apologize to me, of all things. She just wrote me a second email, while I was writing that second paragraph up there about my dear Anna, that made me cry at my desk with its generosity.

I can’t tell you how free and light I feel, having written that email. I can’t tell you how much my life has been enriched and expanded by my mended friendships with Anna and with my other friend in Seattle. I can’t tell you how frightened I was, actually physically terrified, each time, to open my heart to these people: standing on a cliff’s edge, looking down to the mangled depths of my heart’s ragged canyon and hoping that at the bottom there will be a smooth running river that would catch me and float me away safe home. It’s such a risk, such a chance. I have not done it often.

And, as you might imagine, there are some instances in which I will never do it. There are some people who, if approached, will eat me alive and I have decided, at long last, not to be party to my own destruction anymore if I can help it. That’s its own freedom, I am slowly coming to see—the ability to make it right as far as you can, and then to just let go, to step over the cliff. Sometimes I have not been very able to make things right. I am very lucky and grateful that, even when I have had to let go of certain people, many many more others have stepped up and held me tight, given me the rest and strength I needed to at least try to reach across everything that separates us. Every time I screw up my courage and press Send, I feel another hand on my shoulder, and I become a little more human.