All Apologies

Written By: Saniya Ahmad 

Dear person who had a bad eye,

I apologize for my rude behavior. I should not have stared at you so incredulously for having a bad eye. I should not have stared at you because you were different. It wasn't you fault that you were born with it. You did not ask to be this different. I’m sure you must have had a difficult time going about, with people awkwardly looking at your eye, just like I did.

You were so polite, helping me buy the Converse I had come to buy. You even went out of your way to give me a 10% discount. You even told me I could replace my Converse if I didn't find them too comfortable. You told me to come back soon for the new stock. You told me to have a nice day. Basically, you were nothing short of a perfect gentleman.

But I kept staring at your eye. While on one hand, I was trying my level best to pretend you were just as normal as I was, on the other hand, I couldn't stop thanking God it was you and not me. I felt ashamed of myself for ostracizing you from my definition of normal but I couldn't help it and I want to apologize to you for that.

I’m sure you must have met a lot of people in your life who mocked you or jeered at you because of your eye. You must have experienced people cringing at you when they see your face. You must have faced rejection while making friends, while applying for jobs, while just trying to live your life as normally as you possibly could. And I apologize for that. You see, us, normal people, we have a disability too, of the mental kind. We just can’t accept people who have physical disabilities. We can’t “hang out” with people who have a defect of any sort, because some time or the other, we end up letting them know we think they’re abnormal, they’re peculiar, they’re weird, that they’re just not like us.

All I want to say is a sorry and a thank you. A sorry for being so rude, for making you feel like you weren't, when actually you are more normal than most of us “normal” beings. A thank you for being kind and polite even though I was technically very rude to you. I don’t have much to say because I am not able to express my feelings into words but in the words of Nirvana:

What else should I write
I don’t have the right
What else should I be
All apologies

Sincerely,

Me.