the coolest apology i ever got

Sometimes people in their teens or early 20s rock up in my discord, and stay for years, and become proper adults. This only happens if they don’t get banned for irritating me, but I’m surprised how often that happens. I can’t imagine being cool or thoughtful or insightful at that age, but some of ’em are. I’ve also been reading the Prince of Persia diaries by Jordan Mechner, where despite being 20, the guy has thoughts that are miles smarter than I remember being capable of at that age.

I didn’t keep a diary myself, so I can’t be sure if my appraisal of my younger self as a cringey little shit is a fair one. Are today’s young folks just cooler? I suspect yes, but I do have an anecdote that’s proof of at least one cool teen from back in the day: the time I was apologised to via mysterious call to adventure.

Eventually at my highschool, I got on great with everyone, I was sad to leave. But for a few years there there was some unpopularity and bullying and so forth; nothing too intense, but I wasn’t having a good time. Totally parallel to whatever else what happening, I was getting the same bus every day as a girl who I thought seemed cool, so I tried to talk to her, but she ignored me flat-out. For probably three years she was blanking me or glaring at me or telling me to fuck off – generally being a bit of a jerk. It wasn’t egregious by high school standards, but it was a bummer.

Anyway, one day I find in my letterbox a mysterious postcard. It’s got an eye on it, and it says “Wᴀʟᴋ ᴛᴏ ᴛʜᴇ ᴛʀᴀɪɴ sᴛᴀᴛɪᴏɴ. A ᴍᴇssᴀɢᴇ ʀᴇᴏ̨ᴜᴇsᴛs ʏᴏᴜʀ ɢᴀᴢᴇ.” and then “Lᴏᴏᴋ Fᴏʀ Gᴏʟᴅ“. What the fuck?

So I walk to the train station, which is disused; I guess the Byron Shire Council reckons it’s not worth running trains between the towns in that area so there’s no public transport at all, just a bunch of derelict stations. I look for gold for a while, wondering how literally to take that, and finally, on the side of the platform, where you’d get hit by a train if there was one, I see this:

Well, not this. This is what it looks like now. I don’t have a picture of the whole thing anymore. But stencilled on the platform in gold paint is something like: “Joe, I was rude to you and you didn’t deserve it. I’m sorry.” And a picture of Audrey Hepburn.

You can still sorta see the “I’m sorry”:

Unfortunately this didn’t really narrow it down, so I had no idea who it was from until she came and asked me a few days later if I got her postcard, at which point I freaked out, and we were friends after that – better friends than most, I thought, though we didn’t keep in touch much after school. I forgot about it for many years, but remembered a couple years ago when I was in town, and went back and got these pictures, which I sent to her. She’s cringey about her teen self too! I said mate, you were the coolest teen ever made. An unsolicited apology for behaviour you examined on your own, unprompted, delivered in a sick, creative, illegal way? You were 16! Anyone I tell about this is blown away.

I often talk to folks who have a properly hard time thinking about their much-younger self. I mostly don’t, myself – you have to let yourself off the hook for old shit, times before you were equipped to do better. You can’t always, and I tend, still, to think of earlier versions of myself as horrible. But although I was often ignorant, or tactless or mean or reactive – the ways I had been shown how to be – I was never bigoted or hateful or wrathful, I always wanted to be kind. It takes long time to realise these things. I’ve apologised to people for stuff they don’t remember and accepted apologies for deeply-regretted stuff that never bothered me. When someone says I made a good impression back then, I wonder how much attention they can have been paying. But maybe plenty. Kids are just kids, man.

Anyway, yeah. Coolest apology I ever got.