Hard for me to say I'm sorry

Maybe it was the full moon.

Maybe it was the overprivileged Manhattanite children who had been sitting in front of me, emailing on their sidekicks and distracting me from Matt Dillon's aging, slightly puffy, yet generally still attractive visage.

Maybe it was the Starburst that stuck to my sneaker in the mens room, and then the toilet paper that stuck to that.

Maybe I was hypoglycemic.

Whatever the case, when I came home yesterday from a midafternoon screening of Crash and discovered that M. had not informed me that our friends had left a message inviting us over to watch the season finale of Desperate Housewives, even though my movie was in the aforementioned friends' general neighborhood, and I had spoken to M. twice on my forty-five minute walk home, and M. was not going to be able to watch DH with me since he is finishing up classes this week, I was in two syllables, livid.

Seven syllables? Irrationally livid. Like, I couldn't see straight. And, as usual, I snapped, and I pouted, and I said unfair things about M.'s inability to cope with school-related stress in any other way than acting like a concentration camp victim. And then, a tiny little voice crept into my head and whispered, "Psst, Phil? Shut the fuck up."

And I told that little voice to go screw himself, which instigated a silent, three-minute knife fight between me and the little voice, during which the little voice suffered enormous physical insult but ultimately achieved his initial aim.

Battle-weary, I called our friends to accept their invitation, gave M. a brief, pouty kiss, and headed out the door.

And then, on the train, it started again. "Apologize. Apooooologize. Apologizeapologizeapologize, you always say you'll apologize when you realize you're being an asshole, and you were definitely being a hypoglycemic lunar-powered asshole, so just freaking be a man and apologize for once." And I tried hard to fight it, tried replaying meaningful Matt Dillon scenes in my head, tried concentrating on wishing that the song currently playing on my I-Pod (All Night, Janet Jackson) had been playing twenty minutes earlier when I was alone on the sidewalk and could continue to perfect my catwalk.

But the L train took forever, and I eventually ran out of defenses, and there weren't even any Poetry in Motion's to get me through the final rounds, and so by the time I got above ground, Tiny Little Voice was at my steering wheel, and I watched helplessly through cloudy eyes as he flipped my cell phone open, dialed home, pushed the earpiece against my ear, and forced the words from my mouth........."I'm sorry."

And you know? It wasn't so bad. In fact, once I got the words out, once the apology was floating up there there in plain sight, I realized that I actually meant it, that I actually wanted to tell the man I love that I was sorry for being such a huge jerkoff, and it felt kind of new and strange and good to acknowledge that I, Groomzilla, had made a silly boo-boo but still had enough sense left over to own up to it, and to avoid another unnecessary night of awkward silence based on my own, monstrous stubbornness.

Not that I'm going to make a habit out of it, but still.