Forgiveness
"What you clutch, you feed"
The Wound
You picked up the shard still wet from where they broke it. Evidence. That was years ago. Your fist has not opened since. First the fingers curled for protection. Then for proof. Then the tendons locked, skin grew over, and one morning you woke with your palm fused to glass – no longer holding it, but held by it. A slow seep, staining everything you touch. You greet the world with your knuckles now, certain that opening your hand means losing the only evidence you were wronged.
The Path
Look at your hand: knuckles white, tendons locked, skin cracked where it fused to glass. Your own blood – still warm – feeding a memory that went cold years ago. They cut you once. You have cut yourself every morning since. Unclenching will hurt. The skin will tear where it grew over the glass. The alternative is finishing their work: dying with your fist still closed around glass they forgot existed. Your fingers open. One by one. The shard falls – a small sound, too small for what it cost. You flinch anyway, as if it could still cut. Air touches the wound. Open and raw, then warm. Then nothing but the world, the pain not sharp but hollow. The palm is scarred. It will always be scarred. But for the first time in years, your palm remembers what it was made for: opening.
The Shadow
Not everyone opens. Some grip until the glass becomes them – shard fused to bone. The Collector of Shards wakes each morning with the fist already raised – his credential, his evidence. In every conversation the hand rises; in every silence the wound speaks. He gathers others who bleed of similar glass. Together they compare cuts, compete over whose wound runs deepest. Anyone whose wound has closed is suspect; anyone who speaks of release is a traitor. Some nights the fist feels like prison. By morning the feeling has passed and the hand rises again. He cannot imagine who he would be with empty hands. Another refuses not by clutching but by burying. She pushes the shard past feeling, past memory, and builds her life on top. I have healed, she tells herself. I have released. She smiles with a palm that looks open but will not uncurl. She marries, raises children, assembles a life so ordinary it could belong to anyone – and it does, because she is not in it. The self that held the glass is buried with it – the self that smiles does not remember her name. The wound returns anyway – as rage she does not name. Her children learn the days her eyes turn glass. They learn the silence that means not today. She dies still smiling. Her children, cleaning out the house, will find no photographs from before.
The Cut
Who cut deeper – they, or you?
FORGIVENESS
What you clutch, you feed
Forgiveness
"What you clutch, you feed"
The Wound
You picked up the shard still wet from where they broke it. Evidence. That was years ago. Your fist has not opened since. First the fingers curled for protection. Then for proof. Then the tendons locked, skin grew over, and one morning you woke with your palm fused to glass – no longer holding it, but held by it. A slow seep, staining everything you touch. You greet the world with your knuckles now, certain that opening your hand means losing the only evidence you were wronged.
The Path
Look at your hand: knuckles white, tendons locked, skin cracked where it fused to glass. Your own blood – still warm – feeding a memory that went cold years ago. They cut you once. You have cut yourself every morning since. Unclenching will hurt. The skin will tear where it grew over the glass. The alternative is finishing their work: dying with your fist still closed around glass they forgot existed. Your fingers open. One by one. The shard falls – a small sound, too small for what it cost. You flinch anyway, as if it could still cut. Air touches the wound. Open and raw, then warm. Then nothing but the world, the pain not sharp but hollow. The palm is scarred. It will always be scarred. But for the first time in years, your palm remembers what it was made for: opening.
The Shadow
Not everyone opens. Some grip until the glass becomes them – shard fused to bone. The Collector of Shards wakes each morning with the fist already raised – his credential, his evidence. In every conversation the hand rises; in every silence the wound speaks. He gathers others who bleed of similar glass. Together they compare cuts, compete over whose wound runs deepest. Anyone whose wound has closed is suspect; anyone who speaks of release is a traitor. Some nights the fist feels like prison. By morning the feeling has passed and the hand rises again. He cannot imagine who he would be with empty hands. Another refuses not by clutching but by burying. She pushes the shard past feeling, past memory, and builds her life on top. I have healed, she tells herself. I have released. She smiles with a palm that looks open but will not uncurl. She marries, raises children, assembles a life so ordinary it could belong to anyone – and it does, because she is not in it. The self that held the glass is buried with it – the self that smiles does not remember her name. The wound returns anyway – as rage she does not name. Her children learn the days her eyes turn glass. They learn the silence that means not today. She dies still smiling. Her children, cleaning out the house, will find no photographs from before.
The Cut
Who cut deeper – they, or you?