I'm sorry, I said, and then my face contorted into two semicolons and a capital A. This is who I would be forever now: sorry. Whenever I would introduce myself to someone, I would tell them: "I'm sorry." And they would say, "For what?" And I would be like, "No, I'm sorry." And then they would invariably be confused. Occasionally they would get frustrated. "You're just saying that because you think that clears you of something you've done/haven't done," they would groan, "and you're putting it on me to forgive you." And I would say, "No, I'm sorry—I'm sorry." Which they wouldn't understand. It turned out that being the personification of an apology made things very problematic, despite apologies being a form of placation, but also in that I wasn't even able to joke about it. "We'll see who's sorry then," my partner once said in their anger at the world. "I'm sorry," I said, which did not make them laugh. In fact, it only made them angrier. "You used to be Greg," they said. "Things were so much simpler when you were Greg and not a people pleaser." Thankfully, the dog ascended to godhood and absorbed stupid me and my stupid partner and the stupid world into its existence and ascended to a plane where it would never be bothered by any of this ever again. The end.