Unresolved

You're one of the last two people to whom I still feel that I owe an apology, and there was certainly no chance of that last weekend.  Really, I can't see any way I'm ever going to be able to offer it.

So this is as close as I can probably ever get, for you:

I'm so sorry that I didn't think to trust you with the darkness that was so consuming me when we knew each other, to tell you what he was doing to me. I suppose if I could have, things might have been very different for me, but I never even considered it.  I think that was because it started in between, when you weren't even in my life anymore, and by the time you were again it was such a part of my reality that I didn't consider talking about it.  I hated myself for it, though, even without knowing it.  Really, I don't see how telling you would have changed anything, anyway; it isn't as if I never told anybody in the intervening decades, but always with the underlying lie intact: wasn't I lucky that it didn't affect me.  That certainly didn't put me on the road to wholeness.  No, the main reason I regret not telling you is that we were good enough friends that I should have been able to tell you, and I'm sorry I didn't.

But there's a bigger thing that I really want to apologize for: I can't hope to communicate how sorry I am to have violated so utterly the hope we had for the kind of people we would become.  I'm sorry that I became, for a time, the kind of person you'd want nothing to do with, who you'd have been ashamed of.  Maybe, knowing, you still wouldn't, and I'm also sorry that I'm not going to give you the chance to make that decision.  It isn't that I'm withholding it from you, robbing you of the choice, just that I don't see an opportunity.   

I hope that my decision to respond to that darkness in the only way I could think of that might bring healing and hope would be something you could respect, at least, even if it was also rooted in a strong sense of self-preservation.  I've been getting healthy since then, and I want you to know that I'm still trying to be live up to the hopes we had for one another.  

I don't suppose there's really any use to this exercise, either, but there it is.