It is 1986. We are 13- and 14-year-olds, rank-smelling in unwashed teenager jeans, unsupervised and latch-keyed after school, huddled around the face of the future: The screen of a first-generation Apple Macintosh personal computer. Within the machine's non-dairy creamer-colored casing is a malleable visual playground unlike anything we had seen before: Manic fonts, brick-wall patterns summoned with a mouse-click and distorted at will, spray-paint lines of variable size and density.

This is the first installment of New Year's Absolutions, an exercise in unburdening guilt before 2013.

All of us have had moments in our lives that we wish we could do over, incidents from our past that gnaw at us in spite of our best attempts at repressing them - or sometimes, erasing them altogether - from our memories. When we say something hurtful we can't take back, or engage in behavior we know is wrong, even if it's a forgivable, human mistake. Some of our writers have volunteered to share their private shame. Please forgive them, and use the comments in this space to share your own absolutions.