Emotions and trauma tend to hang around in your head. Sometimes as clear images. As memories, as stories and as songs. Other times they are an undefined cloud. A mental fog in your consciousness that you can’t quite place your finger on, but you feel it there, weighing down some part of you somewhere. And as easy as it is to adapt around this, to turn your attention elsewhere and tell yourself that you are getting on with your life you must know that if ignored, it will worsen. It will collect, and collect, until it is so swollen it will have no choice but to pour. Please, let it drizzle here and there. Use it to water your thoughts and let it thin out to give the sun a chance to get through.

Don’t look the other way, don’t let it become a devastating storm.

We cannot look at the wrongs people have done to us as debts,
or we will always feel they owe us something.
We won’t be able to see any good they bring,
no matter how small, beneath the eternal shadow of those dues.

Whatever thing they have done has
left a hole that cannot be filled with gestures, money or things.
What people don’t tell you
is that these feed the hole,
make it bigger and hungrier inside you.

No one can make something that’s happened, unhappen.
We can only choose whether to forgive,
and they can only, slowly, try to replace
the memories we have of them with better ones, if we let them.
Only if we choose to let them.

So if you choose to let them,
do not think of it as repayment, as something you are owed.
Tell them instead why you have forgiven them, what that means to you.
Tell them about the hole and how it hurts, and maybe, they won’t disappoint you.

Maybe they can grow to fill your life with
something that may otherwise have been missing.
Maybe their words and their growth
can help make the hole feel smaller,
over time.

Or maybe they’re not ready.
Maybe neither of you ever will be and if that’s the case, you must be ready to let them go.
For both of you to wind along separate paths, farther and farther apart.
Until the echoes of their voice in your memory are so distant
that you question whether the sound you hear when you think of them,
even still resembles their voice at all.

A life with no sadness would not be joyous, it would be lacking.
Short of meaning
void of contrast,
missing the ache that so often taken for granted reminds us that we are here,
that we are vulnerable, that we can break.
That for all their impermanence the things in our lives do matter,
even after they’re gone

There is no wrong place, no wrong time, to begin. The only fear you should have is that you never do

It is at once amazing and shocking that there was a time I believed
we had escaped our pasts completely unscathed,
that such a thing were possible to achieve.
It was like looking into a mirror at an airbrushed reflection,
then down at our legs only to realize
we barely had any skin at all