Apologies that aren't

Apologies are hard things to make, apparently. I've gotten, and no doubt made, a lot of impartial or mitigated ones, ones that contain the requisite words "I'm sorry," but then contain a lot of different modifiers that cloud contrition or contradict it entirely. "I'm sorry you're unable to see how right I am" is a favorite, or "I'm sorry you reacted that way to [X completely logical stimulus], you crazy, mixed up thing." Mostly they add up to a far truer feeling in the apologizer, which is "I'm sorry to have to be sorry to you."

The Key Thief began his apology five minutes before 5 yesterday afternoon, just enough time to make his interaction with me necessarily brief. Ironically, I was more grateful for his brevity than anything else. He began with, "Are you mad at me?" a thoroughly unnecessary opening that nevertheless gave me a very satisfying opportunity to say, "Yes" in the darkest, coldest growl I could muster. It felt good.

I had resolved not to weave a falsified tale of how my keyless night had gone, replete with stories of breaking into my own house after a long and fruitless search for my missing keys and then contacting glass companies to replace the window at great cost, but the urge to do so was strong, if only to teach him a cautionary lesson about leaving people, especially women at night, with no means of transportation or access to shelter.

Instead I told the truth, that I was able to get home and luckily for us both I managed to find a way to get into my house. His response, however, made me regret it. "Oh," he said, relaxing and smiling, "So it wasn't bad." He even did the little hand wave thing, where you swipe the air in front of you as if to clear away a bad image or smell. "All forgiven, nothing to worry about," the gesture says. "I don't think that's your judgment to make," I told him, at which point he scratched the shallow grave of our acquaintanceship deeper by saying, "But nothing happened. It's not like you were on the street or anything."

There was no point in speaking further, so I let what I hoped was a heinous stink eye show him out. How do you explain to someone what it feels like to be scared by a close call? Ultimately there were too many points he would have argued with, too many facts about the experience of being female, or even the experience of being someone alone in an unfamiliar city late at night with no one close by to call for help, that would have required him to make an empathetic jump, and thus an actual apology. Five minutes wasn't long enough to explain this, and the Key Thief is not valuable enough to me as a person for me to find it worth the effort to help him understand.