Pocket Full of Regret
To continue the discussion around the themes in CRIMINAL, I invited a couple of author friends to talk about a time when they’d wronged someone, and what they did –if it was at all possible– to correct it. Conquering our regrets is never easy, it’s an issue that isn’t even fully answered in CRIMINAL, so I send extra thanks to Jen Calonita and Aaron Hartzler for tackling it! You can see my own response down there at the bottom!
Jen Calonita (THE BELLES SERIES, et al)
I RSVP’D “NO” TO MY ROOMMATE FROM COLLEGE’S WEDDING
When I transferred to Boston College my junior year, I was already freaked out. I was finally going away, but I was jumping into the BC scene two years behind everyone else. Would anyone even speak to me? Thankfully, I was placed with two fellow transfer girls, E and J, for my roommates. Even better: the three of us not only got along, we liked each other! So much so that even after we all met other friends and got used to the BC scene, we still chose to room together senior year. For those of you who have lived with other girls, you know how hard it can be to maintain a friendship when arguments about hair in the shower drain and whose turn it was to wash the dishes can destroy everything, but E, J, and I, despite our ups and downs, stayed closed senior year. E, who got engaged soon after college ended, even had J and I in her wedding.
We stayed in touch by email and phone, but as I was the only one leaving Massachusetts to head back down to New York, I wasn’t as close to them as they were to each other. We slowly started to drift apart, especially J and I. I couldn’t even tell you why, but I think once the world took us by storm, we just had different interests and problems to face and we didn’t go to each other for advice like we once had when we were hanging out on our bean bag chairs in the dorm. By the time I got married, J was an invited guest, but I guiltily did not ask her to be a bridesmaid. I did ask E to be one, and I always felt a little awkward about that–not that either J or I ever brought it up. To be fair, she did the same for her wedding–asking E to be a bridesmaid and just sending me an invite. For each of us, we had travelled back and forth for bridal showers, visits and weddings, but by the time J’s wedding rolled around, I had just started my first job at a magazine, had moved out and was paying rent for an apartment I could barely afford, and was in the middle of a huge family drama (which could be a book in length if I started explaining it all). When J’s invite came, I knew I could not afford another dime to get up to Massachusetts for a wedding, give a gift and stay in a hotel. I had to say no–but even I knew it wouldn’t go over well. And it didn’t. Both E and J were disappointed with me. My other college friends were too–couldn’t I crash in one of their hotel rooms? Not give a gift till after the fact (etiquette says I have a year to send a gift, right?)? Or just go for the day (four hour drive each way, folks). I just couldn’t wrap my head around it. I wouldn’t change my mind.
That decision changed everything between E, J, and I. We still sent holiday cards and exchanged the occasional email, but things were not the same and I knew it. E was mad at me about what I’d done, but wouldn’t say it to me. When J had her first baby, and I was finally able to afford more than Ramen Noodles for dinner, I sent a very cute baby gift as a peace offering. I even tried calling a few times to personally congratulate her. At first she didn’t pick up. When she finally did a few calls later, she bit my head off that the baby was crying and she didn’t have time to listen to what I had to say. I never called again.
Over the years, we completely lost touch. I’d look for their names in the BC magazine that had updates about our class, but never saw anything. I lost track of J completely. I finally found E on Facebook and sent a very apologetic email about my behavior and she actually responded. She explained she was hurt that I did that to J, but she appreciated my email. We’re back up to Christmas card exchanging now so it’s a start.
Do I regret saying no to J’s wedding? Yes. I think about it a lot. I should have sucked it up and crashed on a friend’s floor and sent a gift late, but I didn’t. If I could do anything differently, I think I would have tried the one thing I could afford: a phone call. Maybe if I had explained everything going on in my life (including the family drama) she could have seen where I was coming from and have understood. I can’t change what I did, but I still wish I could say sorry.
Aaron Hartzler (Rapture Practice)
He was my first real boyfriend, and I didn’t know I could leave. It’s one of those things that nobody tells you as a young adult: If it isn’t right, you can move on. So, I stayed. I stayed for way too long, trying to control the situation; trying to somehow force him to be the person I wanted him to be instead of accepting him for the person he was—even if that meant we couldn’t be together. Trying to control someone other than yourself is always a losing proposition. You usually hurt yourself in the process—and you always hurt the other person. The poor choices I made during this struggle brought me to a place where I didn’t have any other option but to walk away. Nothing feels more hopeless than only having one choice left.
It has been my experience that the intensity of the love you share with someone is directly proportional to the intensity of the heartbreak should that relationship end. Mary Chapin Carpenter wrote a song called “I Can See it Now,” and every time I’ve seen this guy since, I’ve heard this lyric:
I can hear it now
As you walk away
The something left unsaid
And the nothing left to say.
Sometimes there are choices and decisions made in the heat of the moment that can’t be undone. You can ask for forgiveness, and even have your apology accepted, but it’s like pulling a nail out of 2×4: the nail is gone, and while that scar in the wood can be puttied and painted, it will never be fully repaired. It will always be present.
I’m learning to love my regrets. They are the invisible reminders that I carry with me into every new moment in life. They quietly whisper encouragement to make the best choice I am capable of making, and to play the tape all the way to the end.
And My Response:
I try not to regret things in my life. Every experience, every encounter makes us who we are, now, and I feel if I regret my past, I therefore somehow regret my present.
It’s a Pollyanna approach, I know. But this would not be the first (nor the hundredth) time I’ve been accused of looking at things through rose-colored glasses.
That said, there are a few things I regret, and one is the way I handled a breakup with someone very, very important to me. What’s even worse than the way I behaved at the time, is that now years later, I still have never been able to say I’m sorry; have never been able to correct the way I wronged him, or even acknowledge to him that I did so. It’s not for a lack of trying. I’ve done some regrettably embarrassing things, actually, trying to track him down, just so I could say, “I know I was a jerk to you, and I want you to know that in the lineup of people who have mattered to me–even after all this time–you are still in the very top five.”
Because I haven’t ever been able to right this wrong, or even apologize for it, I’m left to wonder why I still let it haunt me. It isn’t because I wish to be friends again, or because I really want to reconnect. It’s not, even, to absolve myself of terrible behavior. (I was going through something pretty horrendous at the time, and even though I now regret how I acted, I think it was still justifiable.) What bothers me most about this wrong, is that I let someone who mattered very much (someone who still does matter, in the cast of people who have most positively influenced my life) believe that he didn’t count. That I didn’t care. That he was, essentially, ignorable.
Probably, at this point, I feel worse about the whole thing than he ever did. (Though the fact that he’s never looked me up feels like some kind of a sign.) There’s also a part of me that still holds out hope, of course, that someday our paths will cross and I’ll be able to explain. In the meantime, I will continue to try and view this regret with my ever-Pollyanna eyes, and hope that somehow, by still carrying around this regret from my past, I’m still building in a positive way on who I am in the present.