YOU ARE THE MAN who has done it all wrong, right from the beginning. You are spoiled, ungrateful, remorseless and, worst of all, bad. Also inadequate. Never lived up to your potential, a failed experiment, but not much to work from. Flawed. Everything bad that has befallen you is your own doing. Anything bad that happens is, in some way, because of you, either by what you did at some moment in the past, or what you didn’t do, or should have done, at that key moment. Unfortunate, certainly. Most unfortunate! Why couldn’t you have been like X, or Z for that matter? They have done it all correctly, but your way has been incorrect. You feel bad? Well, I feel worse. Whatever calamity or distress you experience is your doing, and whatever is wrong with me is your fault too. And they won’t even talk to you, or barely look at you? Well, who could blame them, knowing everything you’ve done wrong, everything you’ve said wrong. Oh, you’ve apologized? Well, I will be the judge of whether or not your apology is sincere or not. I don’t feel it’s sincere though. You’re lucky I am even talking to you. You’re lucky anyone does. There’s nothing more to say, really. This is all your doing. You did this to yourself.

A SOLITARY BIRD appears, singing a sonorous song from the branch of a tree. She is wild red all over and speckled with silver and dashes of gold. They call her the great northern tihane or tit. She is indigenous to these parts. There are pieces of the world in her song, including pieces of you, the pieces of you that you give away so generously. These are just notes in her song. She stands on the branch and sings. At night, I take the bike out and encounter Sandra, who is riding home to her country estate on a white bicycle. We decide to ride along together, along the fields of rapeseed and strawberry patches, the sunset glowing like furnace embers behind the tree line. At the manor house, football is on the television, and the parents are awake, regaling each other with stories, laughter, and wine. They offer me peppermint tea and solidarity. Later I ride home through the black, straight down cemetery row, with its ancient trees hovering, planted neatly in the days of the Old Regime. The blood orange sun tucks into the horizon, preparing for its morning jaunt. I keep waiting for a frosty apparition or sinister phantasm to appear from behind some stone — an old baron perhaps, or matron of the old estate — someone to scold me for living an imperfect destitute life, for having a sordid, prurient, desperate mind. I keep waiting and I’m scared. I am scared to be alone in the dark on cemetery row. I’m waiting to be borne up into the air by some Baltic German poltergeist. But no ghosts appear to me. All is black and mostly silent out here in the night. The only noise comes from my wheels on the road and the northern tits perched on the boughs of the trees, burbling and chattering and singing away.

AND THEN THEY WERE ON ME, regrets. Tailing my car. Spotted in the rear view mirror, turning up in the kitchen at midnight like Los Angeles gangster hitmen. They wanted to have a word with me, a word or two about things, a word from the boss. Talk things over, talk things through. Talk about those regrets. Yet I did not have them, or at least not sufficiently. For if I did not feel the regret, the lament, the sadness over what might have been, if these grim wreaths of regret did not sprout organically within my being, then could I ever consider them genuine? They remained relentless, in hot pursuit. Watching me from the corner booths of midnight diners, over the tops of morning newspapers, whispering. They nipped at my heels like annoying tropical fish, hastening me to remove my hat at every juncture or circumstance, to drown people in apologies, condolences, outpourings, sorrows. I’m sorry for coming and I’m sorry for not coming. I’m sorry for saying and I’m sorry for not saying. I’m sorry for what I have done and for what I have left undone. Oh, Lord, if you only knew how sorry I was. Can you ever forgive me? Can you ever forgive me for what I’ve done? But I’m not sorry. Truly, I’m not. Not sorry at all. I took responsibility, sure, I told these surly underworld figures that I was behind all of it, but I was not sorry. Tell your boss that I can see the accident or the misfortune, the bend in the road, but I can’t regret taking it, I told them. Tell your boss that I’m just a sweating, sentient incarnation after all, a blood that rushes and pumps, is repulsed. You want me to be sorry for that? No. I’m not. I’m through with apologies. I’m through with regrets. I am through. If you want the truth, I relished it all and then some, all of the mistakes too. The drama, the outbursts, the chaos. I loved all of it, the worst, most godawful parts in particular. These parts I relished the absolute most. I loved them because I loved this life. I have no regrets. I’m not sorry. So sorry I’m not.