An Apology

An Apology

Memories can be dangerously illusive things.

On my first two-week roll, I discussed at length the tenuousness of reality with another firefighter. Sitting on the curb of a Mormon Temple on the border of Utah and Nevada, I talked about one of my strongest childhood desires, which was to see things as they were, as they really, really were. I held a paper plate on my lap—dinner—and played with the grit and gravel, pushing it beneath my fingernails, tossing it softly across the parking lot, softly towards the row of fire trucks. Around us, crews settled on the pavement, on the grass, under a playground slide, under the stars. I wanted to see without bias, I told him, I wanted to see from outside myself. I wanted the sort of truth spelled with a capitol: Truth that was indisputable, incorruptible, above suspicion, real. 

Days later on a different fire, we rearranged rocks into a circular pattern. I told him what I knew now: perception cannot be divorced from reality because reality is perception. The lens I’ve built inside my head, my very particular way of seeing, makes reality. Without perception, the world is merely received, unprocessed and unmitigated, a sensation of the present moment. There is no true real, no baseline from which, by our own false perceptions, we deviate more or less. There is reality and reality and reality, mine and his, with no singular real standing. 

This is how I choose to make my apology. Memories, my perceptions of the past, are mine, wholly and inescapably. I still taste that old desire, to see and to see clearly—and though I cannot, I can never, I hope to be fair to the events that passed and to the people who passed in them.

Discúlpame, you say when you inadvertently brush shoulders. You are trying, but the sidewalks are narrow. Lo siento, you say, which means I’m sorry, although direct translation—I feel it—is far more mysterious.

Discúlpame, I want to say now, lo siento.

Photo 1. & 2. Grouse Creek 3. Views from Mormon Temple in Grouse Creek