a rant on forgiveness
My apologies are declarations of my fuck ups. An admittance of my lack of control. A flashback to when I forgot to grip the wheel at 10 and 2 with my eyes focused on the road ahead. Instead, I kept my foot on the gas pedal as a deer appeared in the road ahead while I was wearing a blindfold tied tight and I am sorry about that. Sometimes I crave adventure but most of the time, I get scared and forget to keep control.
What I hate most about apologies is the let down after hoping for a hopeful outcome. I am always hoping for forgiveness but just as my mistakes continue to fall out of my control, so does forgiveness. All I can do is try. I stick all my limbs into a text an email a letter by carrier pigeon. I put a pulsing maroon heart on fine China with a steak knife hoping someone sees what I’m saying is real.
Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night sweating over an embarrassing moment from third grade and other mornings are cracked from shame of overreacting and feeling unforgivable. I didn’t mean to be the spinning top that life made me but it feels like once I jutted out of the womb, I’ve never slowed down. My mind a million places at once and I am sorry.
I am sorry for myself- for the way I impound my brain with a meat mallet instead of cradling and cooing it the way I do for others who reject me. “Gentle gentle gentle” I mutter to myself as an effort to place a pause on my inner turmoil.
When someone can’t and won’t forgive me, I wonder what I could’ve done better instead of understanding sometimes dialogue can become a rat king of sorts- tails and fine hairs too tied together stuck in a gutter. So I have to leave it. I have to feel hope that time will quell the murmuring in my brain and I will soon be able to shit a solid turd again. My stomach will once again grow an appetite to consume something other than self doubt and red wine.
A lack of forgiveness makes me want to shrink myself to the size of a thumbtack but it is my job to resist that urge to do so. My big feelings and big brain are stupid sweet. I flail and I fall but I try. I admit when I am wrong. I take accountability. I ask what I can do next. What can I do to make you feel better because maybe if you feel good, that goodness will rub off on me even for a brief moment. I am trying.
And maybe, I can try to train myself to navigate away from forgiveness as the goal but instead of being better for the next. I am ending this year watching scabs form over wounds from the past few months. I am watching them turn into small scars that eventually will blend into next year’s summer skin.