“I’m sorry.”
Two words, three syllables; simple enough really.
Joe approached them carefully, distrustfully. He knew there was an irreversibility about those words. He’d stood in a yellow wood and chosen the road better travelled, and now there was no turning back. He felt he was owed a sense of relief, a reward for his decision to pick the popular choice, but none came. Instead, everything he could have said instead hit him like a bus as he walked out looking the other way.
He hoped as he apologised the world would become brighter, the birds would begin singing and the feeling that had been writhing inside him like a demented octopus would recede, defeated, into the shadows. Instead, his words fell like stones, smashing on the floor as he stumbled his way through an inelegant, disjointed cacophony of jumbled adjectives and hope and sadness.
Two words became a dozen, and soon a string of sentences were tumbling out and running off in front of him like a pickpocket with a shiny new watch. Gone were his preciously rehearsed lines, his preprepared defences to the inevitable counterattack looming a bugle’s call away.
Suddenly he was out of breath. His mind spun like a mutinous satellite, whipping its way out of gravity’s grasp into the incandescent entropy of space and nothingness.
He gripped the chipped ceramic of the sink with both hands and met his eyes in the mirror above.
He tried again.
“I’m sorry”.
Better, slower this time. He looked down at his phone as it pinged.
The usual spot yeah? I'm 5 mins away xx
He spat out the last of his toothpaste, wiped his hands on the back of his jeans and headed for the door.
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