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The apology had been the most charged and contested gesture between us, the common element in arguments whose subjects ranged from the trivial (courtesies, chores, choice of entertainment) to the significant (knowledge, character, politics, futures), though, as in any relationship, over time these categories of trivial and significant had become impossible to distinguish from one another, so that as a consequence we lived in a double state of nearly unbearable meaningfulness and meaninglessness – or, rather, forever suspended on the precipice of either: pre-meaningful or pre-meaningless What was unbearable, of course, was the extremity of each condition, but also the not-knowing in advance which condition would be applied (by us, naturally, but as if by some ‘outside agent’) to any given situation At times, it proved difficult to disentangle the act of, say, washing a plate to a lower-than-expected standard from the vast network of feeling and history in which all prior actions were somehow implicated On other occasions, feelings or memories which we had previously considered our ‘deepest’ or most important became somehow neutralised, or evacuated of significance, a phenomenon which we (or at least I) experienced with a weird elation I barely understood: sometimes, in the middle of what seemed to be a critical or even terminal conflict, a sudden tear or opening would materialise in the argument and through it would flood an understanding of its total inconsequence; thus we could find ourselves laughing, sometimes to the point of near-hysteria, at my total resistance to the idea of having children, or her ongoing trauma resulting from a sexual assault during adolescence, or any of the dozen or so other enduring obstacles to our happiness we thought of as ‘major issues’ Regardless of the ‘condition’ we found ourselves in, however, the apology was always a dangerous and unstable element to introduce In the former condition (of excessive meaning), its basic insufficiency or unreliability as a speech act guaranteed the irresolution, and often the escalation, of most conflicts ‘Sorry,’ I would say, not meaning it, having crunched a prawn cracker ‘too loudly’, and inevitably my non-belief in the