Warm, light, bright

If there’s a fallen branch on my path, I move it aside. I may walk down this path again or I may not – but whoever walks there next will have a gentler journey.

For a long time, forgiveness was proof of healing, proof of enlightenment, being the bigger man. (Not something I’ve personally aspired to but funny that it’s always expected of women). Forgiveness was the prescription for trauma – even if the abuse was still happening, if justice would never even approach, if the aftermath of the harm affects you every single day.

Forgive, to feel better. Forgive, to let go. It’s for you, not him.

I hold the duality that those things are actually very true for a great number of people, and untenable for others. But for me? Was it actually the missing piece to my healing process all along, after I had long eschewed it?

I hated him. But I understood how he arrived at doing what he did. And when I thought about his path, his impossibly unique and violent trajectory, I’d think: I get it.

Then the image of my child-self, long before my childness could be in question, would not just flood my mind, but occupy my body. The feeling and shape of her would flare from my heart and in that flash, I felt what she felt. I felt what I felt.

Then I remember the wild, spinning repercussions of a childhood betrayal. All the forking paths I took away from myself, how long it took and how hard I fought to come back.

To forgive him without betraying me was the battle.

On a firefly night, I walked my dog in solitude.

A darker night sky, satellites. Light from insects, from machine, from the full moon. We walked and I was thinking. The time felt right. My life was challenging but good. I was glad to be alive, after a close call. I wanted to know what forward looked like, and I wanted to eradicate whatever was in the way. So I thought about forgiveness – tried it.

Did I mean it? Did I believe it?

How can I really know? I’ve lied a lot in my life and it’s taken this long to unwind the truths therein. I thought I did, in that moment, forgive him. I cried, but I cry a lot and it’s not always indicative of relief or truth or freedom.

I asked myself, am I lighter? And I felt into it, I really did. Inconclusive.

After that, a determined but active mental hand-wave was the reaction to thoughts of him or of harm.

The aftermath of harm eventually became traits, and I make a million decisions on what part of me is me, and what parts are reactions.

Then, a couple years ago, I walked with my dog in solitude somewhere else, listening to Glennon Doyle on her podcast with her sister and wife, We Can Do Hard Things. It was the year we all suddenly had a glut of photos of the northern lights as it crept south. And Glennon talked about how forgiveness must happen at a distance. A vaster, non-human timescale. How looking far enough back in time, zooming way out, we can understand how harm happens.

Don’t quote me, I only remember her words as a mental experience of the parts that landed.

I thought about forks before and behind us all. The times we had good choices and the times we had none. How far back in time good options are conceived, how far ahead bad choices can reach.

I thought, it doesn’t fucking matter if I forgive him.

I tested myself for lightness again. Mass unchanged. I kept walking. I found the bright parts of myself and expanded them. I exhaled onto the sharp darknesses.

When he died, I realized the weight of him had encumbered all along. But incredibly, I was grateful. I was grateful to know the weight had been real. I was grateful to at last know a lightening was even possible. Grateful to have shed a weight I’d grown around but carried.

Forgive if it matters, don’t give it another thought if it doesn’t.

What I was looking for has nothing to do with him except at unfathomable distance. It’s always been me.

I warm the cold parts. I lighten the heavy, and I brighten the dark.

What’s left is love.