You ask me how forgiveness arrives.
I tell you that once I read that every seven years each cell in our body is replaced;
we are made entirely new, no longer the same as we were before.
It has been seven years now. I don’t know how true it is, but I take heart in the idea that I am now someone he has never known.
This body is mine entirely, never touched, never hurt, it had been made whole; a broken teacup rewound in time.
Some days I still feel the cracks.
I trace my finger over the rivers that split the cup. I acknowledge their presence and it doesn’t drown me anymore.
Saint Francis wrote that it is in pardoning that we are pardoned.
It has been seven years. Forgiveness for him never arrived, but for me it did. It arrived a thousand times over.
It began by pardoning myself for the role I played in my suffering.
For staying when it hurt. For loving him and forgetting myself. For the longing I felt when he was gone. For not knowing any better, and for allowing fear to smother my voice.
Slowly, like the sunrise, my voice returned.
And
gently, like sunlight reaching through the trees, forgiveness did arrive.
