Someone says "sorry" and you wait to feel relief. Instead your stomach tightens more than it did during the silence.
Because an apology isn't forgiveness, it's a performance. A sentence meant to fill the hole where something real should be. The other person knows exactly what they did. They said it out loud. And they'll do it again, because saying the guilt isn't the same as carrying it.
Silence hurts one way, clean, wordless, without promises. An apology hurts differently, because it opens the wound a second time, this time with proof that the other person knew and changed nothing anyway. Words like a pillow thrown over a wound that needs stitches.
A real apology isn't spoken, it shows in what happens after. Everything else is just a performance for an audience of one, someone who wants to sleep easy.
