Forgive, but don't forget me.

Stumbling blindly in the dark, eyes sealed shut, blackness all around. The only sense of direction is what I can feel, touching, touching. A flat surface ... a wall ... one, two, three, four. Everything around is surreal, from the ground my two feet are standing upon to the sounds I hear resounding like voices in a deep cave. Are they calling my name? They are but faint echoes, screams, shouts, moans, cries of despair - the voices of the dead, perhaps, or the dying, people who are just like me. Crawling, clawing, trying to escape this horrid place; where am I, how did I get here? Rigid walls built so high that they tower over me, a needle in a haystack that no one gives half a damn enough to look for. I drift away, looking for answers, searching but finding no explanations, no understandings, nothing. Blank after blank after blank, the power of a subdued memory is greater than the human mind knows [oh the irony!]. I am my own prisoner imprisoned in me. Walls of guilt built over the years, brick after brick has been piled as sin after sin has been committed. Who can break down the wall but me, who can free me from this misery but myself?

"To forgive is to set a prisoner free and discover that the prison was you." - Lewis B. Smedes

It is said that there is no love without forgiveness, and no forgiveness without love. It is in times like these that you realize how deep words can touch you, and how striking the meanings of these words are. Forgiveness has always been a fall-back, a tool of sorts used to manipulate people and situations for nothing but selfish reasons. How wrong, how terribly wrong that view is. You live, you learn. Forgiveness is an act of love, an act of kindness that comes solely from the heart. Without forgiveness, this world would be in utter devistation, a world full of communism and fatality and war and misunderstanding. It is forgiveness that saves us from a world such as this, that saves me from losing what I value most dearly in my life. And for that I am so thankful, because I know that the world would no longer be spinning if you hadn't looked past everything and forgiven me out of love. It is truly a miracle, life and love, love and life.