Is it empathy or fear?

Definitely, when people return to my life my whole world turns upside down, they bring back thoughts and facts supposedly long forgotten, but when I have to face them once again it seems that I should have remained hidden from those things and from those people too. Although most of the times I embrace those reencounters, I cannot help feeling that there is something I should have said or done in the past, something that even now, in the present, I am unable to express; above all when I know that, somehow, I hurt somebody I used to love. As it happens, now I am on the other side, this time it is me who dared to appear, in spite of all my stupid mistakes. That is why I have the queer sensation that perhaps he does not want me to be near him again. And the great question is: Do I have the right to remove the past that he may have forgotten long ago?