Wrong

The word 'wrong' can be an adjective, a noun, and a verb. I can be wrong. I can suffer a wrong. I can wrong you. Same five letters, three entirely different relationships to the world: error, injury, action. The English language hands us this little trinity and then lets us spend our lives confusing the three. The word comes from the Old Norserangr, meaning crooked, twisted, awry. Not straight. It was a physical description before it was ever a moral one. Something bent. I am sometimes wrong, and I usually find out about it much later, which irritates me. Wrongness, for me, arrives on a delay, like light from a dead star. I sail along certain of something, whether a fact, a judgment, a story I've told myself about someone, and years later the correction shows up, casual as a postcard.Oh. That. You had that wrong the whole time.What I want is a tap on the shoulder at the moment of the error. Tell me at the time. Stop me mid-sentence. Instead, I get the archive of my own certainty, annotated in hindsight. A friend was angry with me a few years ago, but I didn't know why. So I asked. She was angry that I hadn't given my condolences on the death of her son. I had no idea her son had died. She had put it on Facebook, and I didn't see it. Weeks of anger and confusion dissipated with a single conversation. And there is a confusion I've never untangled: we mix up selfishness, self-care, and wrong all the time, use them interchangeably, weaponize one as another. I left my first husband to save myself. Was that wrong, or was that selfish? I have turned that question over for decades, and I notice that the people most eager to answer it were never the ones inside the marriage. What I know is this: staying would also have wronged someone—me, certainly, and him too, it turns out, each of us married to someone who was disappearing by inches. Sometimes every available door has a wrong behind it, and 'selfish' is just the word other people use for the door you chose. I have been wronged. Or I have interpreted circumstances and people as having wronged me—and mostly, I have come to believe, they were simply wronging themselves. When I was twenty, my boyfriend and I opened a can of beans to make dinner and found slivers of glass inside. Thankfully, we found them before we started eating. They looked like pieces of a microscope slide: thin, clear, made for magnifying and clarifying, shattered into something that could cut you from the inside. We decided we had to tell someone. This was dangerous. Other cans might be on the shelf with glass in them. So we drove the can back to the grocery store, carrying it carefully, like the civic-minded twenty-year-olds we were. My boyfriend was Black. I am white. The manager looked at us, and before he addressed us at all, I heard him whisper it to his colleague, under his breath, two words, the first one a slur:N-lover.Then he turned, dealt with us brusquely, tossed the can—the evidence, the danger, the reason we came—into the trash, and told us there was nothing he could do. Not even a replacement can of beans. I negotiated that last part; we walked out with beans. We had walked in to report a wrong done to us: glass where food should be. We walked out having witnessed a different wrong entirely, one he thought was invisible, one hissed at a volume he believed I couldn't hear. For a long time I carried that moment as an injury, a wrong done to me, to us. It was that. But here is what I see now: he threw away the glass and kept the sharper thing. The wrong he did us that night became a story I get to tell, on my terms, forty-seven years later. The wrong he did himself, he carried out of that store and into the rest of his life—the crookedness, therangr, the bent place in him that he fed instead of straightened. We only wanted a safe can of beans and to alert someone in charge. He wanted to stay twisted. Mostly, when people wrong us, they are wronging themselves, and we are just standing close enough to catch the shrapnel. Which brings me to the third form, the verb, the only one where I am the subject of the sentence. I have wronged people. It is heavy. That's the whole paragraph. I've tried to write more, and everything I add sounds like an excuse wearing a nice coat. Being wrong is a state; being wronged is a weather system that passes through; but wronging someone is a thing I did, with my own hands and mouth, and the verb form is the only one that comes with full knowledge and full weight. Adjectives fade. Nouns can be set down. Verbs, it turns out, we carry with us. For whatever is bent in us that we can't yet see: let's ask people who can see. Let's ask them to tell us at the time. Tap our shoulders. Stop us mid-sentence, before the adjective hardens into the verb. I would rather be wrong a thousand times, and know it in the moment, than wrong one more person and find out much, much later when the wrong has seeped into their bones and cut them over and over again. Share Subscribe now