How I Learned to Sleep Without Saying Sorry in My Head
By midnight, I had apologized to eleven people, and I hadn’t said a word to any of them.
It happened the way it always happens. I turned off the lamp, pulled the blue quilt up to my chin, and my brain switched on like a shop that only opens after dark. Its first customer was the barista from that morning.
I had asked for a lid. Then, half a second later, I had asked for a sleeve too. He’d said, “No problem,” and slid the cup across the counter without even looking up.
Sorry. Sorry, I know that’s two things. Sorry.
He had said no problem. I had heard him say no problem. But my brain filed it under polite, probably lying and opened a new folder.
Was I rude?
Did I take too long?
Who else did I bother today?
The department of small apologies
Here is the list my brain read out to me, in order. I’m not exaggerating. I wrote it down afterward because I didn’t believe it myself.
Sorry to the barista, for the sleeve. Sorry to Ms. Alvarez, for walking in two minutes late, even though the bell hadn’t rung. Sorry to a girl on the bus, for existing near her backpack. Sorry to my mom, for asking her to sign a form. Sorry to a revolving door, because I’d pushed it too hard and it had made a noise. Sorry to my phone charger, which I had stepped on.
The charger made me laugh, a little, in the dark. It was the first useful thing that happened all night.
Because for the first time, I could hear how it sounded. Most of those sorrys weren’t about people. They were a reflex, like a hiccup. Every time I took up a little space in the world, something inside me whispered sorry before anyone had asked.
And I was exhausted. I had spent the whole day being careful and polite, and then I’d spent the whole night billing myself for it.
A jar with an address
The next afternoon, I told Zoe. She was sitting on the library steps with a pencil in her curls and a tiny gold star pinned to her cardigan, eating clementine segments one at a time like a very serious jeweler.
“So you apologized to a charger,” she said.
“It was an accident!”
“Lina, it’s a charger.” She wasn’t mocking me. She said it gently, the way you’d tell someone about to leap over a puddle that it’s only a puddle. “Also, yesterday you said sorry to the revolving door. I was behind you. I heard it.”
“It made a noise.”
“It’s a door. Noise is its whole job.”
I put my head on my knees. Zoe waited, which is one of her best skills, and then she pulled a clean jam jar out of her bag. It still smelled faintly like strawberries and eucalyptus.
“My aunt gives these to everyone at the flower shop,” she said. “Tonight, write each sorry on its own slip of paper. Don’t think. Just write. Then put them all in the jar and go to sleep.”
“And then?”
“Then, in the morning, you sort them into two piles. Real and reflex. And here’s the only rule.” She held up a clementine segment like a tiny gavel. “A real sorry has an address. There’s a person it belongs to, and there’s one small thing you can actually do about it. If it has no address, it doesn’t get delivered.”
Nineteen slips
That night I wrote nineteen slips. It took eleven minutes, and the strange part was how much quieter my head got with every one. I had been carrying all those sorrys like a stack of heavy plates. Setting them down, one at a time, felt like unloading a bus.
The next morning, I sat on my bedroom floor with the jar and my yellow mug, and I made two piles.
Pile one: Real. Pile two: Reflex.
The barista went in Reflex. So did the bus girl, the revolving door, and the charger. By the time I’d finished, Reflex had seventeen slips, and the pile looked like a very small snowdrift.
Real had two.
The first was Priya’s math notebook. I’d borrowed it on Monday, and it had been sitting in my bag for four days. That one had an address. I wrote to her: “I forgot to bring your notebook. I’ll have it tomorrow. Thank you for waiting.” I noticed I hadn’t typed the word “sorry” at all, and it still felt kind. Priya replied in under a minute: “lol I forgot you had it. thanks!!”
The second slip was the hard one. On Tuesday, in our science group, Dev had suggested we build our model volcano out of a cereal box, and I had said, in a voice that came out sharper than I meant, “That’s a dumb idea.” He’d gone quiet. I had pretended not to notice, and then I’d gone home and apologized to a charger instead of to him.
That one had an address, too. And it did not fit in a text message.
I found Dev at the science table before first period. My hands were cold. I said, “On Tuesday, I called your idea dumb. It wasn’t. I was stressed, and I took it out on you. I’m sorry.”
Dev blinked at me for a second. “Oh,” he said. “Okay. Thanks.” Then, after a moment, he added, “Honestly, it was a little dumb. But thanks.”
We both laughed. It was a small, ordinary laugh. And it did something eleven nights of silent apologizing had never done: it was over.
The night the jar wasn’t enough
I’d love to tell you that was the end of it. It wasn’t.
Three weeks later, at 1 AM, I was apologizing again, this time to a teacher I had accidentally interrupted. The slips came out like a flood, and the jar was too small, and after seven of them I just stopped and sat on the edge of the bed with my face in my hands. Nothing sorted. Nothing felt like it had an address. It all just felt like me, and all of me felt wrong.
I texted Zoe: “The jar isn’t working tonight.”
She wrote back in seconds: “It doesn’t have to work every night. What did you do today that was kind?”
I thought about it. I had held a door for a stranger, without apologizing to it. I’d lent my pencil case to a girl in homeroom. I had said “thank you” to the bus driver, and he’d smiled.
I put the half-filled jar on the nightstand and said, quietly, to the ceiling, “Thank you for today.” To whom, I don’t know. Maybe to me.
That was enough to sleep on.
Now the jar sits next to my bed, about a third full. Some nights I fill it. Some nights I just look at it, and my brain goes quiet, like a dog that has seen the leash.
I still say sorry when I should. I just make sure it has an address.
With love,
Lina