I say sorry for the weather, sorry for my shoes, sorry for the way silence sits heavy between us.
My mouth is a coin purse and the word jingles out whenever the room tilts a degree I don’t like.
I apologise like a habit.

I apologise for walking into a room with too much thought, for folding my ideas into smaller shapes so they’ll fit.
I apologise for speaking up; I apologise for the spaces I leave empty like polite graves.
I apologise for being soft where the world demands bluntness, as if softness were an offence and bluntness the currency.

There was a year I learned to pre-empt hurt, tighten my vowels, tuck blunt edges into sleeves,
and the practice became a coastline: neat, apologetic, eroding me slowly into a smaller map.
People started to navigate me by my sorrys and missed the atlas of who I might be without them.

I say sorry when I shouldn’t: to a chair I bump, to a laugh I can’t catch, to strangers for existing loudly.
I say it like punctuation, like a comma where I mean to plant a period, like a lamp left on in rooms that don’t belong to me.

But sometimes a window needs opening, and a sorry is a hand that clamps the sill shut.
Sometimes the space I leave is not mercy but silence that teaches me to be smaller.
There is a difference between tending the world and trimming yourself to fit other people’s comfort.

So I practice new verbs: I thank, I name, I refuse without an apology.
I hold a boundary like a cup and say: this is mine, and it is not rude to keep it.
I practice saying, I notice, I won’t, and watch how the room rearranges itself around words that are not excuses.

At the edge of the day, I whisper less apology and more address; clear, small, true.
I am learning to keep my sorrys for the things that actually need them.