#reiterations

Please, brother, be(a)ware: your life is a weapon -- every time you unholster your canines, and brandish your teeth, newly freed from the braces you used to call _tooth-jail_; every time you are happy, grateful to have woke and lived another again... be(a)ware: they will see your smile and decide whether or not to respond with deadly force.

And it becomes clear to me that it's a good word used by good people. Nobody is truly virtuous, nobody avoids the creeping curse. Every character in every story is buffeted between good and bad, between right and wrong. But it's good people who ca tell the difference, who know when they've crossed the line. And it's a hard and humbling gesture, to take blame and admit fault. You've got to get brave to say it and mean it. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry means you feel the pulse of other people's pain, as well as your own, and saying it means you take a share of it. And so it binds us together, makes us as trodden and sodden as one another. Sorry is a lot of things. It's a hole refilled. A debt repaid. Sorry is the wake of misdeed. It's the crippling ripple of consequence. Sorry is sadness, just as knowing is sadness. Sorry is sometimes self-pity. But Sorry, really, is not about you. It's their's to take or leave. Sorry means you leave yourself open, to embrace or to ridicule or to revenge. Sorry is a question that begs forgiveness, because the metrenome of a good heart won't settle until things are set right and true. Sorry doesn't take things back, but it pushes things forward. It bridges the gap. Sorry is sacrament. It's an offering. A gift. Yes. Sorry is when good people feel bad. And the folks who trouble me are the ones who, through some break in their circuitry, through some hole in their heart, can't feel it, or say it, or scratch it into trees, or transmit it to the sky with their palms kissing.