Chapter Eighteen — — What He Would Say to Each of Them

Chapter Eighteen

What He Would Say to Each of Them

To Zara, if he could: I do not regret the board switch. Whatever it cost and whatever it did not produce, it produced something real in me — a seriousness about effort, about the possibility of becoming more than the version of myself that the easy path was producing. You were the occasion for that. Whether you were the cause is a question I have been arguing with for years and am setting down now. Thank you for the occasion. I am sorry I never told you what the occasion was.

To Nida: you deserved the full conversation. You deserved the honest explanation of why I pulled back rather than the silence I gave you instead. The silence was the coward's version of consideration — the refusal to wound by explaining, which only delays the wound and makes it harder to locate. I am sorry for the silence. You were interesting and genuine and you deserved better than two days without explanation.

To Hana, the most and the hardest:

You were fighting for me and I did not know it and I fought with you in the middle of your fighting and then I waited for reasons that felt like integrity and were partially pride and I let the window close. I should have stayed. Not stayed in the sense of remaining physically present — I was physically present. Stayed in the sense of not letting the shame of the error become the reason for the greater error of the permanent withdrawal. You were fighting the hardest for it. You deserved the person who fought back.

Perhaps the most honest accounting of a set of losses is not the accounting that explains them but the one that names what was owed and not delivered. Not for absolution — the naming does not produce absolution, which would require the presence of the named. But for precision. The precision of knowing what the actual debt is, rather than the vague unlocated guilt that distributes itself evenly and therefore nowhere.