There are times when the past rises up again, like some foul beast with many sets of snapping teeth or a headache you've been holding at bay with aspirin that's just worn off and no matter how good you think you've healed, you remember: fear after injury is an evolutionary tactic.
Lying in bed with my new lover, he asks me, did I get some sort of closure, some positive resolution? I'm not sure if he's asking: did you find acceptance and forgiveness OR did you get justice and accountability? I laugh because I believe truly that neither is possible. Visions of sledgehammers dance behind my eyes and I remember the time I told the radical priest, 'there's nothing I could do to him that would be worse than what he's done to himself' and he said, 'well, I can think of a couple of things with pliers.' Forgiveness is a problem to me because it implies somehow that the hurt isn't still being done when what we know about trauma is that it's not neat, tidy, and over after you've attended to it. Trauma ripples and rises and re-emerges in creative and fucking annoying ways. So often, we are left putting the pieces back together for years as we try and make sense of the horrifying things people decide to use their lives and bodies for.
Narcissus.
Here's the thing I don't want to forget: we are not responsible for the fucked up things other people have done to us. Here's what I want to remember: we learned to heal in magnificent ways. We are not broken. We are not wounded. We are tough and smart and worthy of honor. Surviving in this world requires resilience and we learn how to cultivate it slowly, and over time.
