The apology you still owe

There is a person attached to today's low and you know their name. Somewhere in the years of smoking you missed something that mattered to them, or said something you cannot take back, or you were simply not there because you were off doing the thing you did instead. Clean days do not reach backwards. That is what is sitting on you tonight. You could stay free for a decade and the afternoon you keep thinking about would still have happened exactly the way it happened.

So stop trying to undo it, because undoing was never on the menu. What is on the menu is repair. Repair is smaller than you imagine and it is available this week. It is a phone call. It is one sentence that begins with the words I am sorry and does not go on to add the word but. It is showing up to the next thing you would once have missed. Repair does not erase the injury. It changes what happens next, which is the only part still in your hands.

Notice what you have been doing instead of that. You have been paying interest. Every low evening you take the same debt out, look at it, feel awful, put it back, and pay nothing off. Guilt without action is just a subscription. It bills you regularly and it buys the other person absolutely nothing. The strange thing about a real apology is that it can only be paid once. After it is made you are done carrying it in that way, and the account closes whether or not they sign anything.

Ask God for the nerve, then pick your one thing and put a day on it. Say the sentence. Make the call. Show up. If they receive it, good. If they do not, you have still stopped running a debt you were never going to clear by feeling bad about it in the dark. Their forgiveness is theirs to give and not yours to require. Yours is the doing. Tonight all you owe is the decision, and you can make that before you sleep, with nothing said yet.