Formal_Redress_for_amaranthineSwell.txt

When do you aggravate me the most, Ockzel Tewbor?

When you are *Right*

When you challenge my brazen pride,

When you don't let me, or my family, or anyone else rest easy on their laurels

When you are a gadfly, slaying the elephant in the room with words conspicuously short of sugar and bitingly laced with acid.

(Actually, I take it back. That is a sight to behold when well-done, and I rather appreciate it.)

You ask uncomfortable questions and call me out on my authority and the soundness of my judgement in front of my entire community and I /hate/ /that/.


And I have repeatedly responded to this by punishing you. I have showed a flagrant lack of regard for your privacy. I have publically belittled you, speaking as if your objections, concerns, or questions, could not possibly hold worth. I have unfairly brought up past actions and attitudes I had already forgiven you for. I have dug up old hurts I have nothing to do with, simply to wield your past as a weapon.

I have not treated our relationship with the respect that it deserved.

I responded to your attempts to call me out, to keep me honest, by deciding I had something to prove. And I chose to prove that I could use my words to hurt you more than you had hurt me.

Why the *FUCK* did I do that? What kind of pride justified that choice?



...none. None at all. Returning hurt for hurt, and wound for wound, for all that I'm a broken old veteran, could never be an excuse.

Not when I had a responsibility to you. Not when I had a responsibility to my community, even before I had a responsibility to you.

In short, I have set the shittiest example of behavior possible. And I want to cut that out.

As the human idiom goes, I want to turn over a new leaf. I hope writing this will be a step in that process.

Go straighten yourself out, you said. I'm working on it, I wanted to say, but I promised to give you the last word. I've been working on this for over a linear week since everything exploded, and I didn't 'cheat' with Time and ask a future self for help, or ask any of the other friends or family I'd usually to go when I need help getting my head pulled out of my ass. It was...painful. Picking apart our arguments and how they made me feel. Reading over the lines where I found myself defending you to others.

It made me realize that, yeah, I did want you around. *Do* want you around. In my life. Not as...a punching bag or a social accessory. As a sparring partner? As someone else around who would call it like it is. As someone to be exasperated to.

As someone to be fondly exasperated at, Ockzel Tewbor, if you'd have me. If not, then as a friend, or, at least, an accquaintance.

How do I effectively apologize for this abuse? How do I make reparations for what has been done between us, if such a thing is possible? Throughout the time we have known eachother, I have repeatedly disregarded my empathy in favor of listening to my damage and my pride.

You have me in a vulnerable position, Ockzel Tewbor; I don't know what to do now. But rather than make any presumptions, I figured I'd ask /you/, about what /you/ wanted.

With my respect, regret, and forgiveness,

Ross Eberhardt