Leo
Human beings don't necessarily exist inside of (or correspond to) the neat racial, gendered or national boxes into which we often unthinkingly place them.It's a mistake to ask literature to reinforce such structures. Literature tends to crack them. Literature is where we free ourselves.
Mohsin Hamid
The apology that was never offered lives in the space between what someone thinks they communicated and what you actually received. You have been carrying both versions of the conversation, the one that happened and the one that should have happened, and the weight is not in the missing words but in having to hold both stories at once. What looks like stubbornness from the outside is often just the exhaustion of translating someone else's intentions when their actions keep saying something different. The relief you are waiting for will not come from them finally speaking the right words, but from you deciding you no longer need to hear them.