I wish I could tell other people how I truly feel, but my memory tugs at my jumper and pulls me a step back, like the loyal friend who has seen you make a fool of yourself at the bar for enough years to stop you from ordering that last drink. It is funny, too, for it fails me when I need to remember crucial things, for I require a plethora of notes and lists to even pretend to be a person. But now, I often tell people what they want to hear, and my feelings seem to not fall under this label if I deem them unnecessary or irrelevant, and if I observe that my pouring my heart out may cause more harm than good, I keep them to myself. And then, they boil over for a little bit, and then they turn into regrets. I have a proverbial box chock-full of unsent letters, tightly sealed within dusty covers in some corner of my heart. And if you asked me where that corner was, that, too, I would not be able to answer.
My poor heart has been silent for so long I do not know what to tell it, but even now, the apologies echo. You see, it was not always this way. It was not always that I kept my thoughts to myself. I did not always regurgitate all I heard in one place into another. You see, my mouth was twice as open as my heart, which itself knew no restraint, and I blurted words at the first thought of them. I told people I loved them before I knew what it meant; to even begin to understand, it took me years of quiet. And now, I feel it. I feel it as deeply as my love for life itself, and I open my mouth to tell them, “I love you,” but all that comes out is an apology.
You see, I blurted things too often, and I blurted all things wrong, and when the words did not betray me, my tone did, and when the tone did not betray me, the moment did, and when that, too, was in my favour, fate intervened, and what can you tell fate but “sorry”.
“I am sorry, I am sorry,” the valves of my heart open and shut and all but apologies reverberate through them.
“I am sorry; I love you. I am sorry that I do.”