Sun, 22 May 2005

a lesson (one)
It is commonplace to hear that regret makes a home in the things we avoid, the things we postpone, the things we tell ourselves we do not want, more so than in our actions and statements, but I don’t think this is true. The things we say, stammered by insecurity and made ugly by frustration, mark us in ways that become deeper in time, limit the trust and kindness others will give us, cut letters into our skin that no midnight move or change of clothes will hide. We take these failures as necessary components of our makeup, stones in the stomach, cheap fatalism to explain away that it was simply a mistake, a misunderstanding, something I should have kept inside.

Tell the man who hit his wife that action is better than caution. Tell the woman waiting out the next seven years in a cell it is better to have done than not done. If you have ever listened to me, ever paid what I say with even the slightest credence, I beg you listen to me now: everything you do not understand that waits in your heart must be hidden from the world, as all it wants is to hurt you.
(08:15.05.22.2005) [/scrytch] #