I Will Never Be Sorry For Us

By

I have a million things to be sorry for.

I’m sorry for the sass I used to give my mother back in high school. I’m sorry for the yellow lights I’ve blown through, even when I knew they were almost red. I’m sorry for the lotion bottle I stole when I was a kid, and I’m sorry for the things I broke and blamed on my little sister. I’m sorry for the times I came home after curfew and the dent I got in the side of my father’s car.

I’m sorry for a lot of things.

But one thing I’ll never be sorry for is us.

I’ll never be sorry for the way we jumped into love, even when we weren’t quite ready. For the way we laughed in the face of fear. For the way we said ‘f*ck it’ and decided, against all odds, against time and fate and rational thoughts and clashing personalities and different families, to be each other’s everythings.

I will never be sorry for how we sacrificed ourselves as we stumbled through, learning how to love another person when we were still trying to figure out who we were.

I will never be sorry for how we believed.

Believed in each other, in the strength of our love, in love itself.

We were imperfect. We were naïve. We didn’t make it.

But I’m still not sorry.

Because we grew up; we grew up together. We taught each other things about ourselves—the strong people we could be and would become, the way love makes you fight both for and against another, and how it is to love someone who isn’t right for you.

How beautiful it is to fall in, fall out, and know there’s a future person waiting.

I will never be sorry for the feelings we both felt. The incredible pain, the indescribable bliss. We discovered how to care for someone when you’re still unsure of who you are. We learned that even when you’re young, it is still possible to love someone with everything you have.

We grew up. We grew apart.

But I’m not sorry that change got the best of us, that our hot-headedness pushed us apart. We became who we were—two different people, capable of amazing things—and still those people, maybe even more of those people, when we finally let go.

We loved and we lost. But I’m not sorry.

I’ll never be sorry for the way we collided, crashed, caught fire. Because we burned but we felt. And we loved.

Yes, we did.

We loved and we loved and we loved. And you can never look back on something you loved with anger, with bitterness, with hate, with apologies.

So I won’t.