Movement Three -- What He Calls Forgiveness

He says he has forgiven people. Many people, across many centuries -- the blind man who betrayed him during that terrible mission with the tavern-keeper's wife, the whole long list of smaller cruelties this world has handed him across an existence longer than any single soul should have to survive. He tells that story often, and tells it well, and the household receives it, every time, as proof of some deep and admirable generosity in him.

I know better. I know, because I have watched what actually happens in the moment he decides to forgive something, rather than simply listening to the story he tells about it afterward. He does not forgive to release the person who hurt him. He forgives to release himself -- to close a wound quickly enough that he never has to sit inside the full shape of what it cost him, never has to look directly at the specific, ugly reality of having been hurt at all. He runs from what damages him. He always has. He simply calls the running something nobler, dresses it in language generous enough that no one, least of all himself, ever thinks to name it what it actually is.

Consider the blind man. He let him go, at the end of that mission, after everything the man had done -- after watching him offer his own wife up to eight bored, cruel gods rather than protect her, after watching him participate, eventually, by proxy, in whatever was done to her because the alternative required a courage he never once found in himself. The plant let him walk free. And he has told this story, more than once, as an act of honoring some fragile, illusion-born paternal bond -- the way you honor a debt even after learning the person you owed it to never earned it.

If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.

What a hypocrite. What a careful, elegant way to describe simply not being able to bear the alternative. If he had truly faced what that man did -- sat inside the full, unforgiving weight of it rather than releasing it the instant it grew too heavy to hold -- I do not think forgiveness would have arrived nearly so quickly, or so cleanly, or so conveniently close to the exact moment the mission itself was ending and the whole memory could be folded away and never fully reopened. He did not forgive the blind man. He simply could not stand to keep carrying him, and mistook the relief of setting something down for the virtue of choosing to.

I find, telling this part of the account, that my own hands are unsteady, which is a strange thing to notice about hands I was fairly certain, until this exact sentence, did not belong to me at all.