The Saddest Story I Know

I cannot tell you the saddest story I know, because it was passed along to me by someone who is under the obligation of professional ethics to not share it for publication. But, in a larger sense, I can of course tell you the saddest story I know: It is yours. Oh, sure, you can pretend that I don’t know you that well, but, really, you’re not that special. You’re just like the rest of us. Your life is wracked with recrimination and regret, and even in those rare moments when you can somehow convince yourself that you are mostly a good person, you know that you are only a careless remembrance away from recalling just how terribly you’ve treated someone whose only wish in this life was to love you and be loved by you. You’re a monster. We all are. There are nights when we wake with a start and recollect just how terrible we were, wishing only that we could undo the past and set things right. Unfortunately, we are not given that power. We are here to suffer, to constantly confront our capacity for cruelty, and we do not receive respite until the day we finally do the decent thing and die. But this weekend, at least, we get to turn time back an hour. I guess that will have to be enough.

Photo by javarman, via Shutterstock