This is one of my favorite songs to lay in my yard and listen to. Last year while home I liked going outside just after 4 and walking with my headphones in and sitting down in the grass to daydream. Making this month's newsletter felt dreamy in a sense, slow, sometimes melancholy.
Enjoy.
Suddenly you’re sitting across from someone apologizing for the worst thing that has ever happened to you.
I wrote that down in my phone after I met with someone who was, by no exaggeration, apologizing to me for the worst thing that had ever happened to me. The events had long passed, but as we grew further from them they became ever the glaring projection of a situation for which neither of us was proud. So we met. It is a strange thing to do, to meet for an apology, to meet for an apology we both knew to be impossible. Impossible because it was sad, and real, and so needed nothing might ever feel sincere enough to mend it. We sincerely apologized anyway, both of us, equally guilty of being unfair to one another. It was the first real true apology I had ever heard. I felt our sincerity and our regret in the room with us as if it were mediating our conversation. We talked about everything, everything we had never said as much as everything we’d already known. I thought I would start to feel a shift or some kind of relief where I might accept their apology. Yet nothing changed. The more closure I got the less different I felt. I realized I had already forgiven them, forever ago, at no particular time, in no particular way.
The simplicity of the interaction is somewhat exaggerated and the details intentionally vague, but the portrait of forgiveness is true. It came very simply to me. I wanted to forgive them so I did. Years later though the events still come up in therapy. It happens not through the lens of what was done to me but instead what I did in return. I feel an intense embarrassment when I think about everything. For one thing, I’m no longer the person I was, accepting such poor treatment at the hand of someone else, but I also feel I never was her. I always knew better, even then, but the risk of asking for anything better was too high. I was afraid of losing what I had, at a time where I felt I had hardly anything at all. When I speak about it my whole body reacts, I feel I can’t even look at my therapist while I say it. Until one session she interrupted me just to knock the wind out of me.
“You have to forgive yourself for the thing you did when you wanted to be loved.”
I thought about this a while, but in the moment I didn’t recognize this diagnosis. The simplicity of before when I forgave someone else had eluded me. My embarrassment was more familiar with regret rather than the place we come when we forgive. I thought like anyone I was someone who had things they weren’t proud of but was finding ways to move on just the same. My understanding of forgiveness was in one singular scope. A mistake, perhaps a miscommunication and hurt feelings, upset unsettled emotions, followed by apologies and forgiveness. Her words, however, deterred all fault lines I’d built on. I could seldom recognize where forgiveness was needed here nor navigate its new particular geography.
In some sense, I don’t know if I had ever been in a position where I had to truly forgive myself. The same way I had never heard such a sincere apology until that afternoon I met with someone just so they could say it. So I didn’t know how. I was feeling something similar to skepticism. I thought my therapist was right but I wasn’t sure what to say. Or I was skeptical of myself when I thought about forgiving her. In the days after I was told to forgive myself, I tried the only way I could think how. I’d apologize, randomly, interrupting a string of daydreams to remind myself I was sorry. They were vague apologies and somewhat insincere. I feel as though I was waiting for the past to change, waiting to be different, but having no way of doing so. The apologies felt hollow because I hoped after saying it in the present I’d hear it in my past self’s voice. I wanted her to apologize to me.
I had always understood the way we come to forgive people as a hall of mirrors. We could not subject ourselves to the act of forgiveness without sometimes bumping into ourselves. I preferred to go into apologies with an apology of my own. I knew our reactions and miscommunications did not exist in a vacuum and I considered the endless possibilities of how the events occurred until I was equally guilty. I don’t know if I recommended this, but doing so allowed me to see something else. I may never know why things happened. There are gaps for which I could never fill of why people do bad things. Our relationships were so nuanced and complex the only answer I arrived at was, just because sometimes they do. That is why it felt so simple then because I knew sometimes we made decisions that didn’t reflect the thing we were even if it was the worst thing that had ever happened to me. But of course like giving advice this image of people didn’t translate to the image I had of myself. I was actually perfect I assumed and therefore more guilty than anyone. Atwood wrote forgiveness is a power, to give it and to withhold it. For some reason, the grip I had to withhold my own forgiveness was stronger than it was with anyone else.
I didn’t understand then that our relationship with ourselves can equally elude us. I have a history of life for which I cannot directly remember, but store in my body just the same. I think beginning with an apology, despite the veil of skepticism I felt, is a good way to start even if you don’t believe it. Truthfully I am sorry. I’m sorry I didn’t do the things I knew I had to do. I’m sorry I acted in a way that hurt me in the moment and hurts me worse now. And I’m sorry I isolated myself at a time when I needed others most. I don’t feel though I am forgiven yet. I just know I am close to it.
It’s true as it always has been, I can’t change the past. Yet I think this is part of accepting the imperfection that is forgiveness. “I forgive you” doesn’t say I will no longer be angry about what’s happened, but instead is saying I will no longer hold this against you. I can feel how forgiveness feels, I can feel myself relinquishing the power it is to hold myself to an impossible standard. A couple of weeks ago I bumped back into my old self. The circumstances looked nothing like that of what happened years ago, the version I have yet to forgive. Yet the reactions were similar. I felt very alone, sad, closed off to the world because I was hurting, and to share felt like a risk. Instead, though, I opened. Perhaps not entirely but in part, sharing I was not having a very good time with things. It was difficult. It illuminated to me the even greater difficulty I’d have felt were I the person I was years ago. Future me has some apologizing to do too. I’ve been hard on myself. Maybe the best form of forgiveness is just this—compassion and any attempt we make to do better for ourselves than we did before.
When I say it’s close, forgiveness, I’m actually saying I may already be forgiven. It’s hard to describe something without end or beginning. I may find one day I go to forgive myself like I did with that person so long ago and see relief has already arrived. It is a strange room, forgiveness, which we are free to walk in and out of. I don’t feel tethered by it which is to say it is a freedom to forgive.
Sometimes my therapist will ask me what something looks like. She usually means how I imagine good change will present itself. She didn’t ask me what forgiveness looks like, but I have a feeling one day she will. I already know the answer. I think it looks like vulnerability, the good kind, the kind that makes you brave. I imagine a quiet morning where it’s just me and the light is diffused through the curtains but a surprising yellow hue. Nothing may seem as though it has happened, but in reality, I’ve survived. I think back quickly to those days where I wanted to be loved. I’m not her anymore, but I once was. This past version of me, I see her. She’s waiting for something. And the only correct thing to give goes something like this: farewell, I forgive you.
Do we ever really believe the hands we wrap around ourselves aren’t really our own? But the apparitions and imagination of the people we wish were here. Do we ever stop wanting to be touched by phantoms 12:41 pm April 22nd, 2021
Sometimes I hope the voices below are yours and you take a moment to look up at my apartment building, maybe to say to no one at all, I knew a girl who lived there. Unaware that I’m still here in that building laying in the rooms you walked through hungover and tired. Your shoes by the door, the front door, where you promised me you’d see me later. May 1st, 12:21 am
I’m not awake, but I was. It was too early. I could tell because the outside silence was too particular. Nothing was going on. The light, soft and defused, grey and white, gave away the hour. I was woken by a particular sound, cutting through the air. A car stereo. In the quiet it reverberates a love song. I’m too tired to understand the words even though they sit like birds on my windowsill. Instead, I turn over and within one-third of my following dream, I realize I'm asleep. You are no longer at work but on a rooftop where the quality of light is opal. I look at you and you’re happy. A happy with me you had never had. My friends are across, a table between us, and we have no food to eat or hunger to remedy. I don’t know what’s being said. I am distracted by this feeling I know to be true, that you will only be this way once. The tables around us are joy. They talk but I can’t overhear. You turn your head from mine and by now—by now I know if I interfere this will be the second time I lose you forever. But to have you for a dream is at least a way to have you. I interrupt the conversation of the table you were having to tell my dream self to rest a head against your shoulder. In a dream second delay I do. The movements drowsy. I pretend there is a feeling of you there, on my cheek from one single memory. Seeing up close your shirt crisp white blow into the breeze I saw the air move. Your hand encouraging, a feeling I can’t recall anywhere, grasps me just to pull me in. My dream eyes blink and my real eyes open to the bed I knew empty from a 40-minute dream. And what a dream it was. To be had. To have.
My mood board for May once again sits and waits for you right here!
This week I announced that this newsletter will include an announcement and here you are! At said announcement. I feel as though I can’t jump around this or give an intro without creating worry so I think the only way to say it is to say it quickly:
I’m making a paid monthly newsletter.
For 5$ a month or 50$ a year
Absolutely nothing about this newsletter you have only just read will change
Okay, so I feel that is the top three worries or questions one could think to ask. I know sometimes when people begin to do paid work their free work suffers. I also know how much I loved the MET’s pay by donation, the Whitney’s Friday reduced prices, and The Cut’s monthly free articles. I know how it feels to want to connect with art and others despite paywalls and part-time income-based wallets. I love this newsletter as it is. I don’t want to water it down for the sake of bringing paid content to your mailbox. I want to have content which engages you and the free newsletter in a way that fulfills us both. I think I can do that better if I eliminate a stress of mine recently which has been my finances. Ultimately I’m 24 and I’ve never been paid to write (besides my zine for which I made almost no profits after shipping and printing. Like I don’t even think I was in the double digits of profits). I have been getting emails about ads, 200-dollar-per-post ads, and that’s just not the thing I want to be. Here’s, instead, what I’d like to do.
My paid content will be in conversation with my free content. Therefore I can’t create paid content unless I make free content. I did this intentionally, not because I thought I’d forget or fail to do the free stuff, but so you guys know how much I care about doing this whether you pay for it or not. I think about this newsletter every day and I look forward to the free time I set aside to work on it after school, between classes, and on the train to Trader Joe’s. Like the origins of this newsletter, I reserve my right to change depending on the needs and the creativity of each month, but I’m sure you’re wondering what you’ll get each month if you subscribe. Voila! An interview, exclusive access to my book club, exclusive poems from my poetry purgatory, and little trinkets and extras sprinkled in.
The paid content will come out the day after the free newsletter and I have some fun stuff planned for the first one. Tomorrow I will send out a mock-up which will explain more in-depth what you’ll get. As well as I will announce via Instagram my plans and the first book we will read together!
I’m excited at the prospect that my writing is worth something. I hope though you aren’t disappointed in me. I’ll still be here like usual, like always, with love and gratitude. But for now,
Forgive me!
That’s all this month! If you enjoyed the little conversation we had let me know! Save +share your favorite parts and tag @chloeinletters
My Instagram is @chloeinletters where the DMs are checked, cared, and loved for.
My Goodreads where I sometimes write reviews but keep updated is right here where more of my library is contained as far as books go.
My website is where you can check out my portfolio and contact me
My email, if you want to cut to the chase, is letterstochloew@gmail.com where you can let me know what you think or ask me a question about what you saw here!
Here’s to forgiving ourselves, the bad things we did then, and the good things we do now.
Love always,
Chloé
The Imperfect Room of Forgiveness
The price of things is often difficult to measure because value and cost are often tenuously linked, changed by circumstance and time. After reading your past posts, I would say they have become a window that brings not only light but warmth. Keep writing and don’t ever bargain over your creativity.