I wasn't feeling too well yesterday so I took half a day off to rest, recuperate and watch a movie between house chores. But then I had enough of that and went to work around 15:30 and had a rather productive three hours. I worked more efficiently than usual. Maybe I should spend less time at work in order to be more efficient and spend more time at home subsequently getting sick of it enough to leave and go to work. What a delightfully twisted pattern to get stuck into. (I have a sliver of social life left and I try to make the most of it in between this work-home pattern...)
Another twisted thing happened recently, though not delightful by any stretch of the imagination. A few weeks ago, I received an apology. If it wasn't bad enough that I received it seven years too late, it came in the form of an Instagram message. I somehow knew that this person was going to make contact. He had been liking my posts and a friend of his added me on Facebook etc. And he did. To apologise, not ask for forgiveness... (his words not mine.) Yes, he is an ex who (like most exes of mine) left me abruptly with a pittance of an excuse, can't even call it an explanation and never even bothered to ask me how I felt about it or checked up to see if I was fine (I wasn't.) People apologise after long periods of absence from your lives usually looking for catharsis. And mostly because they are moving into a different phase of their lives e.g.: having kids or moving to a new country. Or they're drug addicts and apologising to people from their past is part of their rehabilitation but who know which one it is for him. I have composed elaborate and eloquent speeches in my mind about my response to such situations but even copious amount of preparation cannot guarantee the response one wants to give. Instead, at that moment I felt nothing. A big giant nothing. he asked me if I regretted it, if I felt sad. I told him as politely as I could that I didn't have any regrets and it all was probably for the best. He told me he was aware of how much he hurt me and was terrified of my reaction. If someone thinks apologizing to me after seven years will make me feel anything, they shouldn't. It is not cathartic for me, it is not life affirming or kind, it's nothing more than an empty gesture and I would rather we just moved on instead. Yes, it takes time for me to move on, but I would take that time and look ahead than at the past.
It's a rare occasion that I quote pop culture but this dialogue from Bojack horseman really resonated with me: "Closure is a made up thing by Steven Spielberg to sell movie tickets. It, like true love and the Munich Olympics, doesn't exist in the real world. The only thing to do now is just to keep living forward."
