You play dead. Everyone fucks up beyond even their own explanations, and when someone does that to me, I want to things. Two things it can be hard to give.
1) they sincerely apologize without explanation (they deserve no sympathy from the victim and any explanation at all, no matter how modest, begs for one)
2) they either die or make like it. they must go away until if and when they’re forgiven.
I forgive people. That’s my nature. It’s part of acceptance. Even those many things about myself I didn’t choose I’ve chosen to accept, otherwise I couldn’t love myself. But if anyone ever gave me any indication they were cognizant of that fact during an apology, I’d never accept it and if and when I forgave them, they’d never know. I’d never tell them.
So this applies either way to me, and there are several people I’ve reluctantly made like dead for. Not that they deserved my death, of course, nor did I deserve to die, but if they truly wished for my absence from their lives, it made enough sense to me they deserved that. And anyhow, if they couldn’t forgive me no matter the amends I wished to make, I shouldn’t want to interact with them anymore. We should just make separate ways in this big world, or even city. But if you two live in a small enough town, one of you are going to have to leave.
Fortunately, I’ve never lived in that small of a town or been involved in a crime involving death. Just physical assault, property crimes, and some truly awful maligning of character. Nothing, as I’d said before, out of my capacity to forgive. I hope that never happens to me–but philosophically, it probably won’t. I can’t live that way, so even if they happened, I forgave at least the incident, the people are no longer in my life or I in theirs, and thus I’ve thankfully forgotten about them, at least out of the context of this particular moment in time. Right now, I’m at utter peace. And I know for a fact no matter how troubled you are, you will be too. We all will be. That much, I believe, even as an atheist, is absolutely assured.
