sushi apology letters

We sat for most of the night in a fluorescent light sushi place, writing apology letters.  It started out with me saying something about how I wished I could atone for all of my transgressions, not the ones that were against businesses or other conglomerates, but the transgressions that were committed in lieu of another person.  I didn't say it like that at the time, it was more like: "Man, I wish I were more honest."  We ate sushi at first, when we were hungry.  Eventually the waitress realized that we were not going to buy anything else, and she left us alone.  My friend was a an old one from high school, a girl I had sort of grown up with.  We had drifted in and out of touch over the years, but she was one of those people that I could always sit down with and stay seated without feeling like I had to go the bathroom, or get another beer, or go outside to make a fake phone call.  We both had that ability to open our minds to each other, like some red glow Cyclops (from X-men) beam of honesty and understanding.  Sometimes we lied to each other, but it was always known that the lying was happening, so wasn't that almost the best kind of truth?  

She came up with the idea of writing the apology letters, and there was a moment when we both felt like the laziness of sushi and sake and more than anything, life, would overcome this brilliant idea.  I asked if she had a pen, because I did not, I always in a constant state of losing writing utensils.  She did, of course, in her big brown diamond patterned purse bag thing, and I, of course, had multiple small notebooks in my pocket, the kind that are very thin and flexible and do not have lines, so you can draw pictures too without feeling like your drawings are being impaled by ultra thin gray lines of doom.  This was really going to happen, had to happen.  This was something that I must have been waiting for, although I was careful not to say the word destiny at any point, because that word usually destroys the moment with it's weight.  

The first apology I wrote was to my cat, Bellhop.  Once, when I 12, I became obsessed with this one rap song called "Get At Me Dog", by DMX.  I couldn't understand how someone could be so angry, with the voice, and the grunts, and the saw blades that this man was shooting from his mouth.  It was like someone had injected a lot of air bubbles into his blood, and his heart kept trying to pump them out, only they would get larger and larger inside his body until they popped violently like an over-inflated balloon, and that pop was a line in one of his songs.  I was infatuated, he was my hero for that week, and my poor cat Bellhop was forced to listen to this one song over and over again, while I learned the A-bomb lyrics to the point where I could mimic the dog grunts to a T.  It was a terrible moment in my life, but surely more terrible for Bellhop.  He was never the same after that summer; I think it might have had something to do with the random dog bark explosions that seemed to punctuate DMX's music.  Bellhop would walk around for the rest of his life, always looking over his shoulder, his tiger ringed tail flicking with the nerves of an inept security guard in a Wesley Snipes movie.  He didn't deserve that week, so that's why he was owed an apology.

to be continued...