An Incident for Silence

1. I have a dear friend who wrote about a very real speech impediment she developed at some point during childhood. In her case, the real consequences of stuttering involved developing her deep-rooted fear of public speaking. Although I don't have that kind of fear, what I suffer from is a strong aversion to personal discourse. It makes me feel uncomfortable because I never know what to say (this is partly the reason I enrolled in a personal essay class) and I'm always wary of how to package information with neither exaggeration nor irony.
2. (The above should also account for the way these entries are written. Sometimes in the heat of the moment but more often--when I talk about sex, sexuality, friendship, and love--I always reread my entries and cringe because they sound disingenuous.)
3. The friends I made in my youth were loud and boisterous and unruly and I preferred them that way because they could perform and continue a discussion with little input from me. My bestfriends will attest to that (hello, I talk about you again). But the friends I made in college--Ace, Peep, Nica, Jamie, to name a few--are much quieter, subdued, and restrained (or maybe that's because I met them at a quieter, more contemplative point in their lives). This is why I had a hard time adjusting to the silence of four years in high school to the silence of an audience waiting for me in college, when I found I wanted to speak but afraid, so terribly afraid, of making people sit down to listen.
4. This evening, during dinner, I almost wept. A friend I hadn't seen consistently since graduation finally agreed to have dinner at a restaurant in Maginhawa. During the jeepney ride over, I carried  a collection of infinitesimal fears like a palmful of marbles gnawing at each other. My relationship with friends had been strained lately, influenced by the shifting plates of our separate lives. This friend and I had arranged each other on an equal platform built upon mutual respect & admiration and I was afraid that, having ridden so far abroad and away from each other, we would struggle and drown in all that empty, wild sea. Now, after a few hours together, I'm still afraid. I've lost enough friends this year. 
5. Relationships are strange, massive, and terrible to navigate.  
6. On the way home walking to the Ministop along Maginhawa, she talked about friends in unhealthy romantic relationships and her position as a voyeur of those relationships, her obligation towards friends gone astray. And she said, "I love them but I disagree with their relationship ethics." And I asked if it applied to me. And in her apple red van, I wept into my hands, devastated by the revelation that I had been acting in a way that disappointed her. 
7. And she said "as your friends, we want to listen to you" and nobody had ever said those words to me. She also said, "and as your friends, we want the best for you."
8. And I'm writing those words now, here, so I will never forget. Because if you write something down, you will not forget. 
9. A sort of morbid curiosity clawed its way out of my heart and I wanted to know how I acted, what she disagreed with, and why, and I wanted, most of all, to apologize although she made it clear it was behavior for which she neither blamed nor judged me. In that case, is an apology still necessary? I apologized for crying in her car and for my human weakness and inconsistency. How do you apologize for that? What's good enough?