Finding Forgiveness

This healing, this forgiveness, it’s like trying to find a lost stone at the bottom of a river. I can’t see where it’s located so I just keep diving in, flailing wildly, terrified that at any moment I’m going to slip, or get battered by the current and swept downstream as the gem jumps out of my grasp. And I can’t swim- it’s never been a strength, though I’m not sure if it’s really just my fear that paralyzes me and pulls me under.

Because I’m terrified of the water and I always have been. Rarely does it make me feel weightless. I sink, dead weight, and it’s at that moment that I’m the most aware of my own powerlessness. No amount of preparation can overcome the prodigious strength of the ocean, the river, those titans. What chance do I have, with my thin white arms, of beating a way to shore? How in that sea could tiny me find what was lost?

But I have no choice. I have to dive in. I have to accept that it could swirl and suck and slurp me into its guts and that I will be vulnerable to the consumption, soft flesh hiding small shells that crunch underneath relentless teeth. It could turn me to dust, if it was so inclined.

I suppose there’s a difference between letting something break me, and someone. It’s a noble pursuit to seek rebirth, knowing that that very quest could be the one thing that silences you forever. But it’s another thing entirely to allow myself to be purposelessly tossed like a tired ship against the rocks, holes in my hull filling with a rising oily blackness.  I resist that end, not destruction itself but destruction that serves only to recycle me. My skeleton becoming someone else’s walls, or floor.

My obliteration will be hard fought, hard won. And I will resist my resistance; I will allow my form to fold under more powerful hands than yours because I believe that true freedom can only be purchased with the currency of my current shape. Maybe I sold it too cheaply before, but I know that what’s left still retains a flickering value.

Perhaps then I will wake up, not in a cascading coffin but on a dry shore. And there will be warm sun, and green grass between my toes. A lightness that makes me dance. Maybe I’ll find myself high up somewhere, because this time if I’m going to put down roots I’d like it to be in a place that’s safe from the flood. There’s comfort in having that firm, jutting outcrop underneath your feet, where even the most robust gust of wind can’t shake my gravity.

Up there I’ll be a fresh peach, all juice and sweetness. Like the flowers and the ferns I will heal in the heat, and my new blood will move smoothly under my sunset skin like it used to. And my lungs will fill with the exhalations of the elevation, a velvety bloom in my throat. I’ll touch the sky and it’ll embrace me like the current never did, lifting where the swirling sea sunk.

Up there I’ll finally learn to float, but this time the water won’t touch me.