WHAT I WISH I'D SAID

My local post office has a very small parking lot and when it's full, cars line up at the entrance to the driveway waiting turns. A few weeks ago, I was the first in line. Suddenly, the car in back of me swung round me and jumped into the lot. I couldn't believe it. I honked my horn and the man driving the other car gave me a dirty look. I just shook my head. It happened that two spaces quickly opened and both he and I parked. When I got out and without thinking I said, "How could you do that?" He was very angry. "You were blocking the entrance," he said, and I heard violence in his voice. "You knew very well that was the line," I said, and left him muttering behind me. I was surprised at how calm I was in this confrontation. I wasn't afraid. I dropped packages off in the lobby and he went inside and that was the last I saw of him. I drove away congratulating myself for my calmness - well, I thought, I've certainly come a long way to be so detached.
     But this encounter has stayed with me in a form that is familiar. What I feel when I think of him is regret, the regret that I didn't think fast enough to say the devastating thing to him. For instance, "If you didn't realize that was the line, maybe you shouldn't be driving at all." Not exactly devastating, I can see, but nonetheless it's what goes through my head. Now, weeks later, that line is what's left of the experience. It comes to me at odd times when I'm driving; I find myself almost compulsively repeating the words I wish I'd said.
     Even now, thinking about my saying those words, I feel a distinct tightening in my chest, something sharp and intense, vibrating. I recognize it - it's what I feel when I'm defending my ego. When I'm trying to get my own back, come out on top, cut the other person down to size. Hurts, disagreements, feeling discounted, anything I feel as a lack of acknowledgement and appreciation can set off this search for the perfect retort, and it stays with me, gets repeated long after whatever set it off has pretty much faded. There are many other examples of this happening to me over the years. An odd line from something well in the past will suddenly pop into my head and, as I repeat and rehash it, I feel the same body clench as if it happened yesterday.        
     As I I think about it now, I realize that the inciting incident, the perfect words I think of later - those are interchangeable. They're just the match that lights the flame of ego defense and every once in a while I need to light that flame. I'm a junkie for the feeling defensiveness and the desire for retaliation give me. Incidents change, words are different - but the feeling is the same.  It's sharp and intense; it gets my motor running and makes me feel alive. 
     But I've learned a lot about what resentment and ego cost me and I'm certain I don't want to pay the price. So I've learned a bit about how to surrender, how to let go of the need to be right. I can practice how to cultivate compassion, to look for the humanity in whomever I face. But like almost everyone else, I'm still caught from time to time. Less than I was, but still...
     Someone once said that writing is rewriting. It occurs to me that living is reliving. We want to go back and revise, to arrange and rearrange the past so it conforms to our ideas of ourselves, makes us the star of any incident, allows us to come out on top. Who knows - maybe if I say the words I wish I'd said to the man in the parking lot enough, I'll come to believe I did in fact say them. Revision of the past will become only the past and each time I remember those words, I'll feel good about myself for saying them.  Who knows?  Stranger things have happened.