I feel so awful right now that I want to die just to stop feeling. No, that is a lie. I want to live without tantrums. Mine. I want to stop being the person who loses control, who rages against his circumstances —whatever they may be— and decides to mistreat those he “loves most” in order to unload his anger. I should say: not those I love most, even if they are — but those most willing to put up with my vomit, my rage, my darkness, my shit. Whether it is a child enduring my outburst, or a wife enduring my passive aggression and my mistreatment, or a brother who receives what I do not know how to process, simply because I find in him what I myself wish I had.
That kind of outburst is like a river of acid that destroys everything in its path. A river that burns the love others have for me, and that carves holes so deep in their being that they end up vomiting their own river over those they love. And so it reproduces itself. Because I do not do this in front of strangers or friends —I do not dare— I do not have these diarrheal interventions in front of anyone I know will not be willing to stomach my acid, my shit. No, I do it to the people I am supposedly willing to give my life for.
The reality is that in some way I am telling them: I love you so much, look at this rotten and ugly thing I have inside me, look at how much sadness, how much hatred, how much frustration I have been carrying, and look at how much it hurts me, how much it bothers me. Here, take it —because you are so special to me— I give it to you as a gift: I give you my pain, my irritation, my frustration, my sadness, my hatred. All of it in the form of a shout, or a grievance, or a criticism — something that stings and wounds. Does it hurt you? Don’t worry, you will find someone who gives you their heart, perhaps even innocently, and you will be able to pass along all the acid, rotten shit that I, with all my love, am passing on to you right now. What would the world look like if I did not do this to my children, to my wife, to my siblings? What would the world look like without this acid river that, instead of being spoken, expressed, analyzed and broken down with the hope of dissecting it so thoroughly that it ends up completely pulverized, ends up being stored away and carried in secret under my own excuse of not knowing how to talk about things? What would the world look like without this? Forgiveness, as the axis of a possible ending to this thought, is what remains in place of silence. To reach that forgiveness one must first arrive at the realization that I am wrong. That I am not so infallible or so special as to believe that my own shit does not stink, forgetting the most important rule in life: that everyone’s shit stinks. Mine too. That is why forgiveness is the tool and, truly, the disruptive element in this illusion. Forgiveness toward those who gave me their kind and putrid donation, forgiveness toward myself for what I have carried without processing, and finally a forgiveness offered on my knees, almost begged, to those who with innocent and genuine love decided to love me so much that, without knowing the consequences, they received, receive, and will continue to receive this singular and horrifying gift of mine.
Try it with me.
Say it to that person or those people, just once.
It can be done.
Say it, every time.
FOR-GIVE-ME.
Forgive me. —