One Summer in Savannah

by Terah Shelton Harris

“forgiveness…is like a door. You can open yourself up to it or close yourself off from it at any time.” Forgiveness can be a powerful tool. It can loosen the knots we often tie ourselves. It can bandage up wounds, large and small. It can heal traumas, visible and invisible. But withholding forgiveness can also cause more harm than good. It can tighten its grip on you and keep you bound to the person who hurt you.

But I challenge you to define forgiveness for yourself. Because forgiveness is for you, and you deserve to be free.

The truth is, my love for her started much later, when the reality of her conception had faded enough for me to see only her, when I realized that she, like me, was a survivor.

“The tides are in our veins, we still mirror the stars,”

I thought of you and how you love this beauty, And walking up the long beach all alone I heard the waves breaking in measured thunder As you and I once heard their monotone.

“Be wise as thou art cruel; do not press My tongue-tied patience with too much disdain; Lest sorrow lend me words and words express The manner of my pity-wanting pain.”

Trauma doesn’t punch a clock, but you can set your watch by it. It works overtime most of the time. But it can be smothered like a whisper in a storm.

“Science has taught me to believe in things that can be derived rationally through logic. I have no interest in a God that has to be believed in.”

“It is up to us to give reason and purpose to events that would otherwise be meaningless and arbitrary,”

The idea of mortality affects everyone differently. Rarely are we privy to the moment of our death. Most of the time, death sneaks up on us like a sneeze.

Let us, then, be up and doing, With a heart for any fate; Still achieving, still pursuing, Learn to labor and to wait.

Trauma changes you, hardens you, leaves its scars.

“Love is never complicated. The circumstances are but never the love.”

Earth…” I sigh. “This is where the dreamers are, the adventurers. There isn’t another planet that we’ve discovered yet that sustains life. That makes it pretty special.

Forgiveness, I’ve learned, is like a door. You can open yourself up to it or close yourself off from it at any time. We can’t rewrite history or change the outcome. Life is a series of choices. And we live in and with those choices we make.