Books

It has been a while since I have felt that I’ve legitimately wronged someone.

I have memories of stupid stuff that I did as a kid, but generally I’m able to push through that terrible cloudy and lingering feeling of knowing that I screwed up at someone else’s expense, maybe with the subconscious intent of damaging or maligning or insulting or disadvantaging them.

Just yesterday I was taught a simile: the separation between God and man is like the separation between two humans when one wrongs the other. I immediately thought back to a time in middle school when I created an elaborate prank call with some friends to another friend – which in short ended very poorly. Cut to school the next day, and I’m literally chasing the prank-call-recipient around the halls just to apologize, meanwhile she exerts every effort to dodge my presence.

But that is old news, because last night I made some jerk moves. My haughty self publicly inferred false things about and to the face of someone I respect.

It came so easily too. I didn’t have to think. Almost like acting out a scene I had invented instantly but already mastered, I say some sort of detached comment and “reach out” with a condescending gesture, seal with a reproachful look, and fin.

In those few moments I write a story, publish it, and grace its cover with my signature.

But the book is stocked onto a shelf and I move on, until the morning (praise God that they are new each day) presents me with the subject of this false biography. The truth confronts my lies, and a pile of my own books falls onto my heart.

Only then did I really realize the jerk I had been. Maybe I prefer the “terrible cloudy and lingering feeling” description to a pile of books… or maybe I want both. A heavy leaden feeling inside and a cloudy dirtiness all around, and I can’t shake either. But I promise myself to make things right between us and do my best to restock the books and let my eyes adjust to the fog.

Now that I realize the likelihood that I would have ignored-away this situation even by tomorrow, it is a blessing that this friend reappeared nearly on the hour. My apology is cumbersome and a bit reticent and certainly lacks the flair of my performance the night before. Naturally I’ll have to pay for this. I’ve already prepared myself to settle up emotionally at least as much as the damage I’ve caused.

But I can’t return this book to the publisher; it’s already been circulated. All I could technically do is write a second novel titled, No, no, for real: Trust this one Instead, and hope that I have equal success – but not greater, just in case I would accidentally grow my initial audience.

But the face I plastered on the cover of my own fiction smiles and says “apology accepted.”

And so I despair.

I run after all the volumes stacked on back shelves so that I can hide them within my body and cover myself again in the sweet lingering shield of fog that tells my eyes the sadness in my heart which I deserve and in which I must remain because I was wrong and I screwed up and I screwed over someone else whose forgiveness I don’t deserve.

I make it slowly home, unable to look up until I no longer might meet other eyes with my own. And I sit here musing and typing until somewhere in the middle I feel these books taken from me. I don’t remember the title anymore and I don’t think I could give an accurate summary, because I’m pretty sure they have ceased to become my intellectual property. The paper goes back to the tree on which my Savior chooses to write another story.

His is a biography worth reading.