being a brief note of apology

More wormwood soon. Trying to get back into the right cadence.

I've started receiving letters in the mail. They're handwritten and they're all in the same hand, though the paper and envelopes are always different. They look like they've been scrounged up somewhere. I have no idea who sent them, but they're always apologies.

At first I tried ignoring them, but they kept coming and they weren't petty things. They were touching and sincere and personal--whoever this was, she knew me. Each one described in exacting intimate detail something that she had done to me, some wrong she'd committed--and each would have been the most beautiful apology ever written if any of them were true stories. But every single one was an event which never happened.

But how can you ignore something so beautiful?

I started dreaming about them. The face of my secret supplicant was blank at first, unseeable, unmemorable, but soon she was everyone I had known, everyone I had wronged and who had wronged me--a beautiful and ever-shifting image. I'd wake up feeling drained, thinking of past wrongs, trying to remind myself that none of this ever happened.

Eventually I started getting confused, telling people about the events in the letters as if they were real, or using them as reference points for the passage of time. After a while I stopped trying to leave the world of the letters--everything is so beautiful there. In the real world there are no apologies, and certainly no forgiveness. There's just moving on.

And if my friends think I've gone mad, what of it? They never did anything for me so excellent as these elegant little apologetic notes.