autopsy of apologies that died on my tongue 

1. Apology for my brothers 

When we were young, I did not know how to be your sister. We learned how to walk on uneven footing, you and I, and I watched you fall while nursing my own scraped knees.  

Our household was shattered when we were far too small to comprehend why. Rather, when we were far too small to comprehend that there wasn’t a reason; that, sometimes, fathers just leave, and children are collateral damage. I feared that fractured logic, trying to make sense of the shards of our childhood scattered around us. We learned the ugliness of the world so early.  

I tried to protect you from this. I wanted to melt myself into the cracks in your gaze, so you could once again see the world unbroken. I yelled at you when you got too close to busy streets, went too deep in the ocean. I wanted to stave off the everyday hurts because we’d already hurt so much together.  

But what I did not understand, what I did not let you tell me, was that you didn’t need to be reassembled by my hands. That I did not need to masquerade as our father, make futile attempts to take his place. You knew as well as I did that I could never sew up the chasm he left in our home.  

I cannot be your father. But I can be here. Let me swear this now: there will never be a day that I am not beside you.  

2. Apology for friendships long gone 

I still talk about you. Often. You spin matinees out of my daydreams, of which you become the stars. I see you in too much; you are woven into songs, old birthday cards, the passenger seat of my car. Our photos are collecting dust in my camera roll. I won’t ever delete them.  

I miss you so much it hurts, but the ache of that loss has soured to anger. I find myself dissecting old conversations, keeping score of who was at fault. How do we quantify our blame? Whose shoulders does our unraveling fall on? In truth, we became different people. The only thing we share, now, is a past, which is too fragile a foundation for a friendship. I wish that I wasn’t so obsessed with this guilt. That I’d just let it drape across both our shoulders, a shared weight that would lighten with time.  

I don’t want to be angry at you. I just wish my love for you had a place to go.   

3. Apology for my voice 

I’m well aware that I am your undertaker. I dress you for burial regularly, hold your funeral in my throat. 

You want to be listened to. You want to scream so loud it rattles my skeleton loose. You want to create a transcript of my thoughts and read it aloud to the world, leaving nothing unsaid. I don’t let you take up space. I wear you thin in the safety of hypotheticals. You are yet another actor on the stage, rehearsing interactions that have already passed, or that may never come to be. There is so much I could have said, so much I want to say. Maybe one day I’ll find the courage. 

4. Apology for my childhood bedroom 

Someday soon, I’ll have to move out of you. I have lived in you for twenty years, and I’m not sure how to come to terms with this. Your walls have held steady from my infancy to my early adulthood. Will you miss me as I’ll miss you? My definition of home is so rooted in you, in the skinny limbs of the cherry tree outside your window. Did you know that the cherry tree was the reason you became my bedroom? My mother wanted me to have the view of its blush petals. She searched for whimsy for me from the start.  

Each time I come home to you, nostalgia lays thick on your furniture. You grow dusty with it in my absence. Right now, I am ever-changing, and you are still. You wait for me as I wait for old friendships—clinging onto a version of self that may never return. I dread the day I walk out of you for the last time.  

5. Apology for my father 

I am not honest with you.  

You see a version of me that is not complete. A version that is not angry with you for leaving me. For crushing my innocence as though it were nothing more than papier-mâché. I am a river-daughter: a surface flat as glass, obscuring raging currents beneath.  

I am scared to show you my pain, shoved beneath my flesh years ago. I’ve already lost you once, and part of me doesn’t want to lose you again. You have proven to me that it’s possible, after all. But I also want you to know all of me, and choose to love me, anyway.  

Nowadays, you text me often. I used to not respond, to leave your messages unopened and unacknowledged. Then I learned about a woman who ignored her father’s attempts to reach out to her, only for her father to pass away, all efforts to reconcile eternally ignored. She wore regret like a second skin. I am better about answering you now.  

You and I are both incomplete in our own ways. Your view of yourself is warped, misshapen so that you are absolved of responsibility. But your decision to leave stained me, seeped into my being like ink in water. I’m sorry that you don’t know all I am. Please, let me give you the truth. 

6. Apology for my mother 

I am sorry that you and I are so alike. When we argue, it sometimes feels like I am battling my own reflection. My most heated disputes are with you, and I think it is because your arms are the safest that have ever held me. Because those arms will be there to sing me to sleep, regardless of the cutting remarks we exchange.  

There was a point where I doubted that. I had lost one parent, and I was petrified of losing another. I convinced myself I was your least favorite child, expendable—something you never even hinted at. I did it to protect myself, but it was wrong. I wish I could take it back.  

You asked me why I felt that I didn’t deserve your love, and I didn’t have an answer for you. How could I ever wrench out the darkest parts of me, let them slick my palms and hold them out to you, breathing out that this is the reason? But, even if you saw these parts, saw every whisper of shame wrapped around my bones, you’d still love me. You tell me that I do not need to earn your love. That, even if I wasn’t worthy of it, it would be there for me. That it’s a given.  

Your love is my greatest gift. Forgive me for not accepting it sooner. 

7. Apology for the little girl I used to be 

You are the only child I have ever been cruel to. I feel your fears alongside my heartbeat; they swim in my blood like ghosts. You worry that you are not enough, that the world around you will collapse at any second. Instead of braving these fears, born from a past that still rattles me to my core, I let you bear our wounds. I let you take the blame for our broken home.  

You deserve to be safe. To know you’re loved. 

Since I don’t tell you enough, I’m going to tell you now: it wasn’t your fault. It was never your fault. You can rest now. I promise to hold you with gentle hands.