Words by: Urvi Goyal (she/her)
I don’t ask memory to leave. I let it sit beside me, unclean and impure. There is something honest in that unwilling companionship.
Forgive? Forgive. Forgive, but never forget.
Conversations about forgiveness with my mother centred around forgiveness as a tangible identity, like a scratchy jumper you can’t help but wear, until resentment burrows into its seams, unpicking it from the inside. Walking home from school after one of my classmates stole my pencil, through my annoyance, she spoke of forgiveness as if it were pure: capable of unburdening me, of releasing the knot gathered within. Forgive. But never forget.
Growing up, I carried this instruction with me. I nurtured it. I believed forgiveness was a blinding purity, capable of minimising the hurt I carried – clean and corrective. I forgave people believing it was the way forward. Forgetting not what they did, but believing I had to forgive. That I had to absolve them in order to absolve myself from my grief.
I find that resentment worms through the purity of my forgiveness, soiling it until I am left an impure vessel of grief. To be forgiven or to forgive – both demand a cleanliness I cannot maintain.
What I never considered was how it would feel to be forgiven. To be released from the ache of resentment. To be granted permission to break the hypnosis of grief.
Forgiveness does neither.
It doesn’t erase shame, humiliation, or guilt. It’s a plaster on a sprained ankle: the illusion of repair, the performance of purity. Alone in my room, when the facade fades, shame and guilt return as my unwilling companions. I don’t believe that forgiveness absolves anyone of all wrong. I have never truly forgiven anyone, because I have not forgotten. And forgetting, I’ve learned, is the price paid for purity.
Time, I’m told, will do the rest. Time acts not as a plaster but as a salve, working under my skin as proof that forgiveness has taken place. But time has never intended to heal. It doesn’t fix so much as rearrange, moving the furniture around the room until the bruise is no longer the first thing you see when you walk in. It feels less like a montage and more like watching sand slip through a timer. Suffocating and incremental. Until one day you look away from the flow of sand and realise the foundations themselves no longer resemble your grief.
To me, forgiveness is a cold winter morning. I feel it first in my extremities, biting at my skin until, without warning, the sensation dulls. One minute I can feel its incessant nipping at the pads of my fingers, the next I can no longer tell whether it’s gone or whether I’ve gone numb. There’s no warmth in that transition. Just endurance. The body adapting to what it cannot.
This is how memory perseveres. Not by waving its hands in the air or sounding a horn as you walk through your life but quietly, anticipating. Grief doesn’t confront you only in isolation; joy occasionally takes an intermission. On an idyllic summery afternoon, sitting among the ladybugs in the grass, when life begins to feel light. When purity is implied by the weather, by the ease of being awake. It’s then that memory raises its hands, not to wave, but to encase your brain with wispy fingers, reminding you that resolution was never guaranteed.
I have learned to live with this wispy intrusion. I don’t long for absolution anymore. I don’t ask memory to leave. I let it sit beside me, unclean and impure. There is something honest in that unwilling companionship. Something truer, perhaps purer, than the insistence that my grief must be washed away to be survivable.
They say bitterness is drinking poison and waiting for the other person to die.
And oh how bitter I am. But my resentment is an anchor too. Polluting the sea in its impurity, it drags me to the sandy floor. It stains the water. But it keeps me from floating into a whirlpool. There is nothing pure about it, but at least it’s honest.
For me, this is living without forgiveness. I cannot imagine another outcome. It doesn’t demand of me confession or the promise of closure, only restraint. It doesn’t beg me to reopen doors for the sake of appearing whole. It doesn’t indulge in reconciliation for an audience that will never repent for my forgiveness – expecting it as a given. Though I remain bitter, I don’t carry it through every moment.
By letting the past exist without demanding justification, I move further from the demands of closure. I allow memory to remain fragmented, without insisting it be fully present or entirely absent.
In granting memory this grace, I give myself permission to break the trance, to live without erasing what hurt me. I choose grace over purity, because grace allows me to live unfinished, but alive.
