I Don’t Want to Be Forgiven

 There’s a strange kind of power in being forgiven.

Not the warm kind.
Not the healing kind.
The uncomfortable kind —
where someone lets go of something you know you did wrong ...
and you hate how clean it feels.

I don’t want to be forgiven.

Not by the woman who used to cry quietly in my kitchen.
Not by the friend I never called back when the war started.
Not by myself, when I tell the truth in ways that leave someone breathless and a little ruined.

Forgiveness, sometimes, feels like being released without having served the sentence.

But I want to carry it.

I want the weight.
The echo.
The memory of how my silence felt like abandonment to someone who just needed one word.

I want to feel it.
Not to punish myself.
To stay human.

I know what I’ve done.
Where I withheld softness out of pride.
Where I stayed distant because closeness made me feel seen in ways I hadn’t agreed to.

And I know which moments were quiet only on the surface —
underneath, they were loud with the sound of me choosing not to reach out.

So no.

I don’t want to be forgiven.

I want to remember her hand, inches from mine,
and how I didn’t move.
Not because I didn’t want to —
but because I needed to win some private battle she never even knew she was part of.

She said, “You could’ve just said it.”

She was right.

I could’ve.

But men like me don’t always speak when we’re supposed to.

We speak when it’s too late.

And we write afterward, because it’s the only place we can bleed without being watched.

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