I’m at a Pay Phone

I struggled to think of what to write for this challenge: what moment, or moments, "completely rocked my world"? But of course I know. I always knew.

Looking back, I think I was lucky that I felt regret, real regret, for the first time when I was twenty-seven. What I mean by that is: I was older. I wasn't seven, or seventeen. It took almost three decades for me to think to myself: I really, really fucked up.

Take the person you love the most, and shatter their heart. Then shatter yours. Mine involved a strangulation, too; the cord of a pay phone. It involved medicine, and time spent away, and people closing doors in my face. I was hurt, but I had no one to blame but myself: for once, I couldn't point a finger at the world, or fate, or family. I could only look in a mirror and see what there was to see, which was twenty-seven years of not properly taking care of myself looking back at me.

I remember sleeping for three days straight: this was right before Covid, so I didn't yet know endless afternoons of nothing but slumber and the regret that comes with wasted time. But in this moment, before Covid, the wasted time couldn't be blamed on sickness, or a pandemic. I could only feel a cold bed and a cold gaze of those who thought they knew me, people who would patronize me when the only thing they were actually doing was telling me what I, in fact, had done.

I felt shame. I had felt guilt before, many times, but never before felt shame.

I picked up the pay phone and waited for forgiveness, but of course it didn't come. I was twenty-seven and suddenly deeply aware that I had shattered hearts, said things I couldn't take back, done things that required me apologizing.

It went like this: a broken connection that was in fact just the other person hanging up when they realized I wouldn't change. Not for them, not for anyone or anything, not yet.

My current therapist said that at some point, around this time, I felt self-worth for perhaps the first time. But it took a pandemic, it took a million diseased breaths before a vaccine, it took time alone to write and reflect that made me realize, I am very alone, but with my writing, I don't have to always be alone. I can be alone on my own terms.

I can, therefore, come to terms with myself, with who I am.

I remember the pay phone call to this day. I remember feeling, for the first time, that I had done something irreversible, something I couldn't take back. It took a pandemic to distance myself from that person, the person I was then. It took a pandemic to make me realize that through writing, I could somehow redeem myself.

With regret that profound, there's nothing to do but find redemption.

And alone, I did. The pandemic was the perfect time to become a writer. It was the perfect time to apologize, too. I wrote apology letters first, ones where I felt sorry for mostly myself first and foremost, then burned those drafts, and then deleted more of that same shit, and then finally found redemption in just writing what I felt.

Finally, I could be free of regret, because I could make others relate to what I had gone through.

It was a repentance, then. Writing as cleansing myself of sin. But when I think back to that pay phone call, the one at age twenty-seven that "completely rocked my world", I think of a girl who had yet to put pen to paper, fingers to keyboard, who didn't know a damn thing about the world, a world that was about to become as sick as she was then, before she got better for having felt regret at all.