I’ve been putting this one off. You can probably feel me putting it off — six nights of looking at the people I’ve wronged and the world we’re wrecking and the bar I can’t reach, and going carefully around the one thing sitting in the middle of all of it. Because the one thing in the middle is the hardest thing a person can do, and I’m not at all sure I can do it.
I have to forgive.
Two directions, and both of them are almost more than I can stand to write. I have to forgive the boss — the rival, the man I’ve fought across two worlds — and not in the cheap way, not “rise above it” while keeping a tidy little file of everything he’s ever done. Actually let it go. Take my hand off the wheel. Stop the swing. Because the material’s been clear with me from early on, and I keep coming back to it: the wheel of all this — the karma, the action and the reaction and the reaction — only ever stops one way. Not by winning. Not by balancing the books. By forgiveness. That’s the brake. The only brake there is. As long as I keep score with him, the wheel turns, and we get another room, another world, another fight. I can end it. Me. By forgiving a man who doesn’t even know we’re fighting.
And then the other direction, which is worse. I have to let myself be forgiven. For Mars. For Maldek. For the pride in the half-second the world cracked. I’ve spent this whole week discovering exactly how much I have to be sorry for, and some stubborn, almost vain part of me wants to keep it — wants to carry the two dead worlds around forever like a penance, because carrying them at least feels like doing something, and setting them down feels like getting away with it. The kind ones untied the knot of fear for me once, when I couldn’t. And here I am, tying a smaller one out of my own guilt and calling it virtue.
Forgiveness is the brake. It works on the boss, and it works on me. I knew that with my head a week ago. Tonight I have to do it with the rest of me, and I’ll be honest the way I’ve tried to be honest the whole way through: right now, sitting here, it feels impossible. It feels like being asked to set down the only thing I’m sure is mine.
But the week’s almost gone. And I didn’t get carried across the dark, twice, by something that gentle, to spend my one clean world clutching the wreckage of the other two.
Tomorrow I’m going to try to set it down. All of it. We’ll see what’s left of me when I do.