The iceberg

Can you claim a trauma as your own if you also inflicted it on someone else?

Does it make a difference if you didn’t want to do it? If you tried to soften the impact as much as possible, knowing that it was still going to destroy the other person, anyway?

What if you fought against the inevitable ending behind-the-scenes? Carried the crushing weight of it for months so that someone else wouldn’t have to?

Your good intentions? Your own anger and grief? They’re all hidden below the iceberg, you know.

Nothing you say or do matters once the collision happens. There won’t be any less damage because you wanted things to be different.

I don’t know how to show you I’m sorry besides saying the words, even though they’re meaningless to your ears now.

Maybe I don’t have have the rights to this story, even though I was complicit in its pages.

Maybe I have to accept that I couldn’t fix this.

Maybe that’s my narrative, instead.