What is the difference between a reason and an excuse?
A simple question.
Or perhaps it only appears simple when you are asking it about someone else.
Had you asked me several minutes ago, I would have answered without much difficulty. A reason was something real: an existing condition that shaped a decision before it was made. An excuse came afterward, assembled from whatever fragments allowed someone to escape responsibility for what they had already done.
One was true.
The other did not need to be.
A clean distinction, wouldn't you say?
I certainly thought so.
After all, I did not lie. I could withhold an answer, redirect a question or offer only the portion of the truth I was willing to surrender, but I did not knowingly speak something false. That principle had survived battlefields, false accusations and more than one occasion when abandoning it would have made my life considerably easier.
Therefore, if every reason I offered Jesse was true, they could not be excuses.
