Apology Letter

Hello everyone and welcome back to EnglishPod.

My name is Marco.

My name is Catherine and today we have a very special lesson for everyone.

It's a new level for us.

Right.

It's an advanced media lesson and we are going to be listening to an apology.

Well, it's an apology letter but we're going to actually have someone talk it out.

Right.

So, what's happening here is someone is reading a letter they've written and they're trying

to apologize for something and we don't really know what this something is but I want everyone

to really listen here to the words that are being used and to the ways in which we can

say sorry because as they say, there are a thousand ways to say I'm sorry.

Dear Mary, I come here today this way because I need to apologize to you.

I failed you.

Although I did not lie to you in words, I lied to you with faces that did not belong

to me.

I never meant to ruin the friendship that meant the world to me.

You mean the world to me and now I come to you asking for forgiveness.

If in your heart you find you can't, then I will understand and learn from this experience.

You came into my life at a time when I needed you the most.

We talked about so many things that I started to realize my heart and my soul could actually

feel something other than hurt.

You placed comfort where there was fear, confidence when there was doubt, a shoulder where tears

could fall and completeness where there was emptiness.

I wanted to hold on to this so badly that I did whatever it took for you to notice.

What I didn't realize was that I could lose my entire being, all of who I was and all

of that I had placed in you.

I wanted to be the one who would be there when you needed to talk.

I wanted to be the comfort for your soul when the world was too much to handle.

I wanted to be strong for you when everything else seemed impossible.

I wanted to love you in only the way you deserve to be loved, never realizing that I was destroying

myself and you.

Somehow I needed you to be a part of my life.

The only problem was that I was willing to jeopardize everything to get that done.

All the things that I told you about how I felt and how you make me feel were true.

Everything else mattered to me except hearing the laughter in your voice when you were happy.

You made my days easy to get through and my nights peaceful.

You helped me look forward to another day.

Even though distance separated us, just being was enough.

I'm sorry for hurting you and if I had to do it all over again, I would have been 100%

with you.

Forgive me please.

All right, we're back.

So the guy seemed to be pretty sad.

Yeah, this is a very intense.

Well, it's not a dialogue.

It's a monologue.

One person is reading it.

So it's a very intense monologue.

Very romantic.

Yeah, romantic, but also an air of melancholy.

Yeah, that's true.

He's kind of like apologizing and at the same time expressing love and all these feelings.

So it was very interesting.

But why don't we take a look at a couple of phrases.

Now in advanced media, we're not going to analyze the entire dialogue or as we do in

the other levels, actually pick out items for language takeaway or fluency builder.

So in advanced media, we're only going to pick out a couple of words and phrases and

just talk about it and talk about the topic in general.

Exactly.

So one of the first phrases that we decided to talk about here is this phrase, I failed

you because this is really the theme of the letter.

Right.

So if you fail someone, it means that you let that person down.

Okay, so you fail someone, I failed you, or you can say, he failed me.

So when I really needed that person the most, that person didn't come through or let me

down or failed me.

All right, so let's give an example maybe.

I needed my brother to pick me up because I don't have a car.

And my brother was supposed to pick me up at four o'clock and he forgot.

He didn't come.

He really failed me.

All right, he failed you.

Yeah, I was disappointed.

Well, this isn't that's not as serious as what happened here in this letter, I think.

Right?

I think so.

But we could talk about what did happen.

I think I have a theory.

And I know you have a theory.

So we can talk about that in a minute.

But before that, we have some other phrases about forgiveness and disappointment.

Right.

So he also said, you mean the world to me and now I come to you asking for forgiveness.

Okay, so we've got a positive and a negative.

So the positive here is you mean the world to me.

You mean the world to me.

This means you are so important to me.

You're one of the most important people in my life.

You're worth the entire world, in my opinion.

Yeah, it's a very poetic way of saying you're very important.

And then he says, and now I come asking for your forgiveness.

Okay.

So this implies that he did something wrong.

I come asking for forgiveness.

So in English, we ask for forgiveness.

You can also beg for forgiveness.

So please, please forgive me.

But you can't demand forgiveness.

I demand you forgive.

No, that doesn't quite work.

All right.

What else do we have?

We've got the world again here.

He says he, the guy who's reading, he says, you know, I wanted to be the comfort for your

soul.

So this is very, again, poetic, when the world was too much to handle.

Too much to handle is a really important English phrase.

And I'm sure you've heard it before, but we could talk about a little bit here.

Right.

So he says when everything else was too much to handle.

So everything was so difficult or it was overwhelming.

Right.

So you could say even in the office, man, all this work I have to do, it's too much

to handle.

Right, right.

Okay.

Too much to handle.

You could also say a child is too much to handle.

I think they said this about my brother.

He was very difficult growing up.

Too hard.

He's too, he's too difficult to handle.

All right.

Well, what about in the part where he says you place comfort where there was fear, confidence

where there was doubt.

So this structure is interesting because you placed something where there used to be something

else.

So you're replacing something, you're changing something for something else.

It's an exchange.

So you could say you placed comfort where there was fear, you placed happiness, where

there was sadness.

Where there was sadness.

So it's always like kind of opposites, right?

Exactly.

Okay.

Light where there was dark.

Right, exactly.

So that's an interesting format of saying something.

You did something where there used to be something else.

All right.

And what about this word to jeopardize?

All right.

This is a good one.

I always think of the TV game show Jeopardy, but that's a noun.

This here is a verb to jeopardize and that means to put something in danger or to risk

losing something.

Okay.

So to jeopardize your health if you're doing something dangerous.

So smoking jeopardizes one's health.

You're putting your health at risk.

Or I don't want to jeopardize my savings by investing everything I have in stocks.

That means I would prefer to do something safer.

So you don't like to jeopardize your well-being.

I like to play it safe, as we say.

All right.

Very good.

And last but not least, this almost the last phrase when he says, even though distance

separated us, just being was enough.

What does he mean when he says just being was enough?

All right.

This is very romantic, intensely romantic.

He says, even though we were far apart, just being, so just existing, just breathing was

enough.

So just knowing that she's in the world was enough for him to feel happy.

So that's what he means with just being was enough.

Right.

So just being is existing.

It's being alive.

Okay.

Very good.

I think we should listen to this apology letter one more time and we'll be back.

Dear Mary, I come here today this way because I need to apologize to you.

I failed you.

Although I did not lie to you in words, I lied to you with faces that did not belong

to me.

I never meant to ruin the friendship that meant the world to me.

You mean the world to me.

And now I come to you asking for forgiveness.

If in your heart you find you can't, then I will understand and learn from this experience.

You came into my life at a time when I needed you the most.

We talked about so many things that I started to realize my heart and my soul could actually

feel something other than hurt.

You placed comfort where there was fear, confidence when there was doubt, a shoulder where tears

could fall and completeness where there was emptiness.

I wanted to hold on to this so badly that I did whatever it took for you to notice.

What I didn't realize was that I could lose my entire being, all of who I was and all

of that I had placed in you.

I wanted to be the one who would be there when you needed to talk.

I wanted to be the comfort for your soul when the world was too much to handle.

I wanted to be strong for you when everything else seemed impossible.

I wanted to love you in only the way you deserve to be loved, never realizing that I was destroying

myself and you.

Somehow I needed you to be a part of my life.

The only problem was that I was willing to jeopardize everything to get that done.

All the things that I told you about how I felt and how you make me feel were true.

Nothing else mattered to me except hearing the laughter in your voice when you were happy.

You made my days easy to get through and my nights peaceful.

You helped me look forward to another day.

Even though distance separated us, just being was enough.

I'm sorry for hurting you and if I had to do it all over again, I would have been 100%

with you.

Forgive me please.

Alright so what do you think he did that he's apologizing in this way?

Because I don't think there were a couple right?

Because he mentions friendship a couple of times.

Yes with a but.

You don't write a letter like this to someone who you want to stay friends with.

You write a letter to this to someone who you have some kind of romantic or intense

feeling for right?

So to me this seems like a letter that was written to someone who was a great friend

and he's afraid of losing that because he cares even more for her.

Right.

But yeah I guess but do you think he's confessing his love in a certain way here?

I think in some ways he's confessing a love.

You can love your friends that's okay.

But more than that he's just he's apologizing for something that he thinks has completely

destroyed their friendship.

And that is where I'm very confused because I have no idea what he did.

Well maybe he did something that let her down.

Maybe he became jealous of her new boyfriend or something like that.

Yeah or maybe it's something catty like he was supposed to do something with her and

ended up doing something with other people and left her out or embarrassed her in front

of people.

It's hard to say.

Now have you ever written an apology letter?

Yeah I have.

I've written a few apology letters.

I have a very strong sense of guilt.

I was raised Catholic.

So an apology letter.

Is it do you usually plan out what you want to say or you just like you just splurge your

feelings onto the paper?

Well you know me.

My personality is very planned and organized and so normally I have points.

So I say if this is the problem there's three parts.

I have an answer for each part and the very end I have the heartfelt apology.

Wow.

It's like an essay.

I guess it's a little bit more organized.

If I were to write something like this I would just like start writing and whatever comes

out.

That would probably make less sense than your letter.

Well I just try to stay on focus, stay on point and address the matter at hand because

otherwise then you get into other stuff and you can make people more angry.

Right.

But it is really important to write an apology letter.

Now some of the words and phrases and the vocabulary used here can be used in circumstances

that are not only romantic.

You can use it in a professional way as well.

That's true.

In a professional sense you want to be careful not to get too personal.

So in a professional sense it's good to say that you're sorry for any mix ups or for misunderstandings

but in the future you will try to make things better or improve.

But in friendships and in families and in romantic relationships apology letters are

very very important because I'm a big believer in mending bridges.

I know a lot of people who we say in English to burn a bridge that means to destroy a relationship

and never go back.

But I like to mend bridges to make sure that people who I was friends with don't, you know

if we have a fight don't just hate me forever.

That even if there's a disagreement that they understand my perspective or that I understand

theirs.

That's true.

I think that's important.

What about apology emails?

Do you agree with those?

I think that they are a necessity of the 21st century.

I mean I live far away from most of my friends and family and so it's important for me to

be able to communicate in any way.

But and sometimes I mean I'm very shy with some people so sometimes it's hard for me

to talk on the phone because I get stuck and then I don't I can't think of what I wanted

to say.

And so if a letter helps in that way to get you past your fear or your anxiety then by

all means an email is just as much.

I actually received a letter, a handwritten letter through an email.

How did that happen?

So the person, they scanned it, they scanned the letter.

Oh wow.

So it was still like it still had a very intimate and personal sense.

But obviously since the mail takes so long and everything they just scanned it and then

they sent it to my email.

That's nice.

So I think that's a good idea.

Maybe you could try that one.

I'll try that one.

I don't agree with the one line email.

I'm sorry, forgive me.

Yeah, yeah, that's not good.

As my parents always used to say when I was growing up and I'd get in fights with my little

brother, the only apologies that we accept are the ones that are from the heart.

So I used to have to apologize again and again and again until I actually meant it.

And so I think that this is a very true kind of idea that, well maybe not in business and

work where you have to be cordial, but with friends and real relationships with people

who you care about, obviously real apologies are very important.

Of course.

So this is an interesting topic and we recommend that if you have any other questions or doubts

or maybe you want some other explanation for this letter, you can come to EnglishPod.com,

leave it in the comment section and we'll be there.

So until next time.

Bye.