Ryan

I was not what you would have called a popular kid. I'm not a popular adult. I have never been the kind of person who has a lot of friends, but I've been blessed to have some good ones. Most of the time, my friendships come through adoption - someone clicks with me for some strange reason, then adopts me into their friend group, and I just end up tagging along for awhile. 

That was the definition of my high school social experience. And it put me with a group of mostly boys who sat together at lunch, got together for gaming, and generally just "hung out." Which was okay with me. It was completely platonic - none of these guys were interested in me, and I wasn't fawning over them. It would have been nice, but it wasn't something I was pushing for or expecting; I was content to just be friends. 

One of these friends was a kid named Ryan. He was a constant presence in the group with a great personality that really rounded us out. I sensed a greater depth in Ryan than he ever let us onto, but I never pushed him on it. We were all just co-existing, trying to get through high school, navigating our own traumas, growing into our own persons. But I always really liked Ryan. Something about his presence was reassuring. He really just made our group feel complete. 

We lost touch after graduation because, honestly, I didn't think Ryan thought much of me. Not that he thought little of me, but that he thought of my little. I was not Ryan's tagalong. He was not my entry point into the group. And I always kind of felt like the group just let me exist with them, neither welcoming nor unwelcoming, but just...reality. Just things as it was. Because one of the other guys brought me in, I just kind of hung around, but I never really sensed that anyone was ever much connected to me. 

Then, almost two decades later, I ran into Ryan in the grocery store, of all places, and I think we hugged. 

We talked for a minute, catching up on our lives, talking about what we were up to. We talked about his wife and the family he was forming. And then, out of that brief, happenstance encounter, Ryan apologized to me. 

He apologized for the way he treated me in high school. For not being friendlier, I guess, or...honestly, I'm not really sure. There were a lot of kids who were extremely mean to me in school, but I wouldn't have said that Ryan was one of them. I wasn't sure how deeply we were connected, but I knew we weren't adversaries. And yet, here he was, twenty years later, carrying some kind of burden about our relationship - what it was or what it wasn't or what it should have been or...I never really understood - and apologizing the first time he had the chance. 

It's a strange thing about being human. At least, in my experience, it's true, and I have many friends who have confessed to the same thing. We see the memes on social media all the time, too, so there must be something universal about it. Memes that say things like, "Just remember that if I was weird to you once, I will remember it for the next thirty years and think about it often." Right now, I could tell you a handful of single sentences, momentary encounters, brief moments in my life in which I feel like I failed someone. Or offended them. Or hurt them. Moments I can't seem to forget, no matter how hard I try. 

Moments that, I'm sure, the other persons in those encounters do not remember nearly as profoundly as I do, if they even remember them at all. 

But when I think about Ryan, and that chance meeting we had, and the way he seemed to have this burden for apologizing (which, by the way, I accepted, even though I did not understand why it was necessary), I think about what it means to apologize. To confess our burdens. To offer our reconciliation. To ask for forgiveness. 

I am learning to be a person who apologizes. And that has become just one of the many things that Ryan has taught me.