Most people from age fifty down to fifteen might well be able to quote the lyrics to Wonderwall and tunelessly sing along to it, but Live Forever has always been my favourite Oasis song. Steve Lamacq, on a recent podcast about the band, described the song’s lyrics as paying homage to the kind of friendship you can only know in your youth: “maybe you’re the same as me, we see things they’ll never see,” conjuring up an image of wandering home from the pub on a light summer’s evening, arms round shoulders, leaning in and propping one another up, tipsily toasting each other and a night only the two of you will ever remember.
I once had such a friendship, back in the latter years of the nineties, which we’re frequently told were halcyon days. Through the bitter hormonal upheaval of my teenage years, they didn’t seem quite so shiny at the time, but now in my memory they are golden. The haze of time also renders this friendship as precious as gold. We had many nights of trailing home from the pub, dizzy with the aftermath of too many vodka and cokes, shoes dangling from fingertips, fruitlessly searching pockets for change for a pack of Silk Cut from the all night garage. On nights when we were flush, we queued noisily with other revellers outside the only kebab and pizza shop in town, before ecstatically consuming a tray of chips on the way home, greasy and salty and hot as magma. Later, after creeping into the kitchen of the house my parents still live in (shushing Charlie the Labrador, who always woke and delightedly thumped his tail noisily against the cupboards in greeting) we’d discuss the events of the evening in my bedroom, stifling giggles and yawns. They were the best of nights and we were the best of friends. I loved her and she loved me. Then one day we didn’t.
We met when we she was thirteen and I was fourteen, and we remained friends until our mid twenties, surviving my moving away to live in London, then Manchester, then Prague. This was in the snail-mail days before mobile phones and email and I still have a stash of her letters and cards somewhere. She was my bridesmaid when I got married, and we each had baby girls within three weeks of each other. Life broke us in different ways, but we both ended up raising our babies by ourselves when our relationships went horribly, painfully wrong. When I left my husband, she was one of the first people I called.
Isn’t it terrible that after all that, I can’t even really remember the incident that proceeded us having no contact for the next fourteen years. We were deep in the exhausting fog of raising babies alone. I was still going through a bitter and nasty divorce and she was struggling to pay the bills under mounting debts and no family support. We were so wrapped up in our own private hells that we failed to be there for each other. There was silence for a while, then bitchy words were spoken and a poisonous email communication was sent, and this caused the final break. It was desperately sad but for a long time I was too angry to care.
Years later, after I’d met with God and married a good man who made me want to be a good woman, I realised I wasn’t angry anymore. I realised I’d forgiven her long ago and now I wanted to seek forgiveness too. I admitted to myself that I missed her. One day I sent her a message and a link to a song I knew was one of her favourites from back in the day, and I wrote “I heard this today and I thought of you.” She could have told me to bugger off, I suppose, but she didn’t. Instead, she responded in good faith, and we agreed to meet up and have a drink.
Christianity talks a big game about forgiveness, how we must forgive others and the threat that to withhold forgiveness is a sign of poor discipleship. Don’t we remind ourselves of how important it is to forgive every time we say the Lord’s Prayer? Yet despite all this talk of forgiveness and its centrality to our understanding of God, I don’t think we’ve fully captured how glorious a thing it is to be forgiven. When someone forgives you it releases you from invisible bonds grown so tight they’ve cut off the circulation, leaving parts of you numb and unable to properly feel. But like wrenching off too small shoes, you experience the soothing relief of their absence only when the pinch is taken away. If, like most humans, you spend a disproportionate amount of time convincing yourself you don’t need forgiveness at all, you’ll never get to experience what that sweet relief is like. Not unless you practice the power of penitence and learn how to say sorry as if you really mean it.
I’m from a bolshy, verbally confident, working class family. I was raised by and amidst people who are very comfortable with conflict, but have no idea how to repair afterwards. Growing up it was normal for a big row to blow up which would temporarily clear the air and relieve angry tension, but underlying hurts were never properly addressed. Unresolved pain was ignored, brushed aside, laughingly dismissed. So conflict inevitably blew up again, usually when drink was involved. I can’t remember hearing an adult say sorry as a means of repair. Sorry was a word of weakness; a humiliating climb-down, too costly to confess.
Northern, working class conflict has a particular flavour to it, so much so that the rift between the Gallagher brothers has always seemed quite familiar to me, bringing to mind some of the more volatile relationships in my wider family. Their much publicised reunion is interesting to me mostly for the reconciliation aspect, a process undoubtedly aided by the tens of millions of pounds that are involved. I don’t presume to know what private conversations have taken place or how they got from there to now, but I would imagine actions that could be described as heartfelt and humble weren’t part of the picture. I hope that one or both of them have learned to say sorry, if only for the sake of all the people who have bought tickets.
I’m sorry, I said to my friend when we met up, and like an incantation had been uttered, it made everything ok. Sorry isn’t always a panacea, of course, but sometimes it really does have magical properties. Before God, my pride wouldn’t have allowed to me to care enough to do the right thing. Before God, my pride was bigger than the relationship, bigger than the hurt that had been caused, bigger than my own well-being. Killing that pride has been part of the process of dying to self and there has been life abundant on the other side of the grave, just like Jesus promised. A true sorry is one which names the harm, names who was responsible and doesn’t make excuses: I’m sorry I hurt you. I was wrong to behave as I did. Please forgive me. Those words would have stuck in my throat like a fish bone and I would never have choked them out. But with God all things are possible. Against all odds, my friend and I repaired our relationship and nearly six years on we sat in a café recently and talked about way back when we were kids, before we were broken. Now that we’re friends again, we are part of each other’s healing and that’s such a precious thing.
In a frame in my bedroom I have a crumpled piece of paper which, many years ago, one of my children wrote a single word on. A note to say sorry, which they left for me to find on my pillow. Maybe they’d been sent to bed early for some misdemeanour or other childhood crime. I don’t remember anymore, but I kept the note as a reminder of the power of saying sorry. I’m sorry is the balm that soothes me and you. I’m sorry is the salve that heals. I’m sorry is the first step on the road to reconciliation, to reforging damaged bonds, to repairing the harm that’s been done. As a Christian, I believe in a lot of unbelievable stuff, but the craziest of all is my belief in the power of an honest sorry and the promise that I really am going to live forever. I also believe that if you don’t learn how to say sorry and seek forgiveness while you can, you’ll have an eternity to regret it.
This is so wonderful. Touches many nerves with me.
I’ve known the oppressive power of not being forgiven; I would never want to put anyone else there. Thank you Jayne for wise words on forgiveness.