“I’m sorry that things got hard.”
That’s like saying I’m sorry it rained, when I’ve no say over the weather. “Sorry” in this context means I feel bad that it rained, with an unspoken corollary: maybe the sun will come out again, and we can all go outside to play.
What my best old ex-friend J ignores “hard” is his own agency during the time of which he speaks. Things actually got hard because he made them hard. These decisions cannot be equated to the vagaries of the weather. They were made by a human being, and many (though not all) were not good decisions.
Of course I regret that we’re no longer friends. It saddens me to this very day, two and a half years later. I try to focus on the good times, as one does.
But I didn’t leave him. He left me, and I’m obliged to protect myself, because those “hard” times he seems to feel happened accidentally, m ......
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