I Am Sorry

Family and Friends,

To those I love, have loved, may yet love in the life to come…I am sorry.

I am sorry this life is not what it should be.

I am sorry for your pain.

I am sorry that we are tired.

That the U and I of our union is too often the I and U of our triune existence, the battle between the self – our secrets - and being seen.

We are the loneliest of liars, even to ourselves.

We are all caveats and cliché, busy being;

that which we are, too often traded

for what we are in the face of what we are not.

I am sorry.

I wish I could tell you I think I am a fool. That I am sinful and scarred.

I wish I could tell you that I need you to think I am beautiful, that I am powerful, that I am strong. Dad look at me!

…That the words I am sacred, I am holy, only ring true to me in a hollow distant way, the way words spoken of others can be pretended over oneself…a remembering and wishing simultaneously.

I wish you could tell me you love me and that I am whole and that I could live in that, but I feel the weight, the needy beast of a thing that gnaws in me, hungering, ever hungering and wanting more….

I am sorry Mom that I don’t believe you when you say I am loved…. I believe you…but I believe you are loving a lie.

I am sorry Dad that I can’t find the strength to believe you when you say you are proud. I am not, I fear my own insignificance.

I am sorry, brothers, and sisters and friends when you tell me I am lovable, that I am the man who I am supposed to be for I fear you are wrong. I fear for all the things I never intended to be and yet am…. What does one do when he finds himself praised for his cleanliness only to know he is the only one with the power to turn on the lights?….

I am not dirty, not in the way you think…no more than the rest…but we are; together we are.

…Sitting in wait, hoping for wholesome wholeness and whole hearted rest…and yet we cry, we cry out to each other, we cling; we beggars begging beggars alms from other beggers outstretched arms.

We sing our songs of lament.

I am sorry.

But, what do we lament? …To whom do we sing?...To whom do we dance? Do we eat and drink for tomorrow we die? Or do we sing, and praise, and cry and love and lose, and hurt all in the hope that one day, someday, one day long in the future, longing will at long last subside…that there will be no more longing, no more tears.

I am sorry.

I am sorry that your pain is not met…. I am sorry that it doesn’t end today. I am sorry you and I are broken….

But what if that wasn’t the end? What if there were more? And what if even all this suffering, all this longing, all this dissatisfied disservice is just a moniker of an absence, a loss felt since time itself was young…. What if sorry could be forgotten?

Dear Love, I am not sorry. This is not the end. This is the chapter, before the beginning, the preface, the “in memory of”, the editor’s note….it is the nothing of the story that begins the longest of stories, the most joyous of journeys, the most perilous of perils to be overcome, the eternal life for which you were meant…that the end is not the end, the end, is the comma, then true life can begin.