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As always, you're in a china shop, so be gentle.
[raptitude]
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It's a Friday, a long time ago. I'm watching a sunset in the middle of a Colorado fall, clouds racing across storm-fed mountains, and against it all my heart still feels small and rotten as the apples scattered on the ground around my feet. This is how I imagine it feels to be wasted, to be sad and wild, hurtling everywhere but forward. The days are lovely and full of life, but at night my heart won't stop pounding, my eyes won't close. How do you consider the lilies when there's enough hate in your heart to start a car?
I used to think forgiveness was a decision, but in times like this, it feels much more visceral than that. You decide to forgive someone the same way you decide to claw your way out of a landslide and clamp your hand around the forearm of the person behind you. Some people say that we should forgive because it's the right thing to do, and I guess that's true, but that's not at the heart of it for me. My need to forgive originates from this deep desire to preserve everything in the darkness that breathes. I need to forgive because I need us both to see the sky again.
Maybe it isn't this way for everyone, and if you're one of those people who has great eyebrows and knows where all your Tupperware lids are and forgives easily then I'm happy for you, but I have to forgive over and over again, six, seven, twelve thousand times. I have to forgive when I wake up in the morning and remember what he did. I have to forgive when I lay down and can't stop thinking about the last thing I said to her, the words scrawled across my cerebrum.
These past years have been hard and fraught with misunderstandings and mistakes. I have made some terrible decisions about who to trust with my friendship, or feelings, or finances, and at the end of it all, after you have been lied to and used and had to nod along congenially to thousands of hours of incredibly boring stories, the only thing left to do is stick your hand out and pull them and you out of the damn landslide.
It helps to think that maybe the reason for my smooth sailing for most of my life had more to do with how freely I was forgiven by others, and not because of my own sterling behavior. I have stolen from people who depended on me and lied to people who trusted me. I'm still shocked when I remember how quick they were to smile at me again, even at a time when I still didn't understand how not to take. Maybe this is what forgiveness is, at the end of the day. Two people walking away from the wreckage, bruised forearms brushing, not talking, the air cold, the dawn so far away, at the very edge of the world. Listening for other cries from the places just out of sight.
