Novel & Cerita My Body Is Not An Apology

I had wanted it badly enough in that first life that the wanting had been its own kind of damage. Now I stood in the actual version of it and felt something quieter than what I had expected. Not the release of years of held grief. Not the collapse of defenses finally allowed to drop. Something smaller and more honest. The recognition that an apology, even a genuine one, did not undo the thing it was apologizing for. It only acknowledged it. “I hear you,” I said. He turned and looked at me. “That’s all?” he said. “What else should there be?” I said. “You said something true. I heard it. That’s what apologies are for.”

“I’m so fucking sorry.” I pressed my forehead to the door. Felt the cool wood against my hot skin. Felt fresh tears slip down my cheeks. “I know,” I whispered. “But sorry doesn’t take the videos down. Sorry doesn’t erase the comments. Sorry doesn’t make strangers forget what they saw. Sorry doesn’t give me back my body. Sorry doesn’t give me back my trust. Sorry doesn’t give me back Noah.” He made a sound—low, wounded. “Ivy—” “Go,” I said. “Please. Just go.”

I sit on a cushion in a room that smells like a fire in an orchard and I ask my body, out loud, what it needs, and I feel like the single biggest idiot alive. My body, predictably, says nothing. "It will, just keep listening," Chloe says, like she caught the whole silent exchange. "It's been a while. Give it time. It stopped trusting you'd actually listen." And that one, God help me, lands somewhere I wasn't guarding. At the door, with my shoes back on, I make myself say the thing I’ve been carrying since our last encounter. "I owe you an apology for what I said to you that night at the gala. It was beneath me, and you didn't deserve it."

I had really stressed my body. “But I really thought I could handle it. I wanted to help so many people and whenever I thought that I could leave, there was just somebody else who was in pain, somebody else who needed me. I couldn't just walk away. I'm sorry…” I apologized, unable to meet his eyes and then he stretched out his hand and squeezed my fingers in his own. I turned to him, feeling the warmth from his fingers reaching up to me and causing my cheeks to blush.

He has tears on his eyes from laughing. "I can see that my embarrassment is making you happy." He calmed down after a moment and he sits at my bedside. "I am sorry for laughing." He apologizes with a solemn voice. Who am I to deny his apology? A mere mortal? "Apology accepted." "Thank You" Really? He thanks me for accepting his apology? I still can't remember what happened so maybe Gideon can fill in the blanks. "What Happened? Why are you here? Why I cannot move my body? And why am I in a hotel room?"

“Say you’re sorry for touching her body.” "I'm s-sorry!" He screams the apology, half-sob, half-vomit, and I smile because the sound is honest now. “You think apology erases your hands?” I ask. “It doesn’t. It’s wood glue on broken things.” I reach down and yank his fingers one by one, bending them until bone snaps with small, wet sounds. He screams so loud the warehouse echoes like a cave. “You’re going to remember this. You’re going to remember the exact seconds you made the wrong decision.”

for whoever was in that room. Something ugly and cold moved through me, not grief anymore, or not only grief. I thought of every year I'd spent believing I owed my existence a kind of penance. Every time I'd shrunk myself smaller because some unspoken math said I'd taken more than I'd given. All of it built on a story someone had “decided” to tell me. "I spent my whole life apologizing for being born," I said, and my voice cracked clean in half. "For this." My hand found my stomach without meaning to. "I let them make me sorry for existing, and it was never even true."

But right then, something in me that had been very still for a very long time came loose. "You always say you gave Maeve the love and attention she needed because of her illness," I said. My voice was quiet but it carried. "But I was the one you wronged. I was the one donating blood until my body failed. I developed Aplastic Anemia because of the constant donation and my bone marrows were being destroyed. I was the one you locked in a closet and left." I looked at each of them in turn. "So why was she the one who got all the love?"

She thought: that is the last true thing. She wrote: Save yourself. She held the pen over the paper. She thought about the last thing. She thought about I'm sorry — the specific form of the apology, what it contained, what it was actually apologizing for. She thought: I am sorry for being the thing that made this necessary. I am sorry for the thirty-seven days and the magazine and the board calling on a Saturday morning and the cold voice and the nine days and the fraud liability and the Martinez situation. I am sorry for the full architecture of what I have cost you by being in this apartment.

I’ve smiled more since I met him than I have in centuries, and as much as I’ve called myself his prisoner, the truth is, I’ve never felt more at home. I have to fix this, but how? Where would I even begin? How does one apologise for calling their soulmate a fag? I don’t think Hallmark makes that card. Rubbing my face, I make my way into the bathroom, undress, and step into the shower. I let the hot water burn away my frustration, and hopefully give me the clarity I need to fix the mess I’ve made.