Yesterday I cried, huge racking sobs that made my chest heaved up and down against the weight of the anger that threatened to crush me altogether if I denied it release.
Crying is not foreign to me, I do it all the time, whenever I feel the need. Because like all human bodily needs, I believe the release of the salty waters processed and collected by a body that knows exactly what it needs must be very vital to the overall wellbeing of that body, otherwise it wouldn't put in the resources and effort that goes into the making of these tears.
Anger isn't foreign to me either, I'm human after all. But there's a characteristic to human emotions that we rarely acknowledge, the many shades and layers and forms of it, which is why even though anger is a familiar, this particular brand of anger is alien to me. It grips differently unto my soul, it tastes tangier than the worst anger archived in my memory, and it weighs strangely heavier than what I've come to accept as the weight of anger, it's almost like this anger is a mix of more than just pure anger, and perhaps that is so, because at its edges I can feel the roughness of injustice and it makes me both sad and infuriated in near equal measure.
So I cried to get release, from as many orifices as it is possible to do. My face wet not just from the salty fluid that's my tears but also from the slimy liquid mix of mucus and misguided tears that lost their way and sought release through my nostrils.
I cried for me, for my healing, and so I did no judging or mental chastising of the person who stirred these emoticons in me.
I did no forgiving either, that is for the healing balm of time to deal with. Because let's be honest, it will be a long time before I'm able to say, ''Come, it was just human miscalculation, you didn't mean any harm, it is alright, I forgive you.''
No, for a while to come, the memory of those tears will enshroud the person who offended me, and I will look at them shrouded in the hurt they caused me and perhaps spite them for it. And that's fine, i think, I am only human.
''Don't beat yourself up over some ill-contrived notion of forgiveness,'' my mother once said, ''take as much time to heal as you need, then you will see that forgiveness comes naturally to you.''
I smiled as I wiped my tears, because for once I feel no guilt whatsoever in taking this advice to heart and deploying it, because I'm deploying it on the person who once gave it, on a long ago rainy day when neither of us knew we'd get here. I love the woman's wholesome foresight.
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