Forgiveness Isn’t a Firework
But Somehow, It Changes Everything
We don’t talk enough about how much time we spend feeding the things that hurt us. You name it. You make space for it. You wrap your pain in soft blankets and keep it company like an old friend. You call it a lesson, a scar, a story. But sometimes, a wound is just a wound. And no matter how poetic you make it, it’s still dragging behind you like a rusted anchor.
Forgiveness—the word itself wears a robe too clean for the places it has to go. You think it will arrive in cathedral light, haloed, ready to bless you for your nobility. But no—when it comes, if it ever does, it comes like a tired thing. Limping. It drags its coat behind it. It looks you in the eye and says, You ready to let go, or do you want to keep bleeding? You don’t answer right away. Because sometimes, the wound becomes familiar—like a room you keep rearranging just to feel in control.
When I was younger, I imagined redemption would feel divine—like candlelight flickering through stained glass, like the hush of a church after prayer. I thought it would glow. But instead, it felt more like defeat. Like backing away from a fight I’d been preparing for forever. I hoped it would feel heroic. It didn’t. It felt like grief. But I did it anyway. I had to. Because the refusal to forgive had started to feel like iron in my throat—sharp, bitter, and impossible to swallow.
The act of letting go doesn’t arrive with trumpets. It rarely feels like grace. Sometimes, it looks like surrender—like crouching low to the earth and releasing something you swore was part of you. No audience watches. No voice declares the moment sacred. You just stop nurturing the ache that’s lived off your attention. One morning, you don’t write about it. Another, you forget to relive the hurt. And just like that, it drifts from you—quietly, like a name left behind with care.
It takes a toll. You start whispering to yourself that not everything requires an end point. That sometimes, the most honest version of yourself lives in the becoming—not in the past, not in the envisioned future, but in the slow unfurling between.
I started treating it like an experiment: how to move without urgency, how to live humbly in the liminal. I’ll admit, there were times I tried to outthink pain. To erase what I’d already seen. To unfeel what had rooted so deeply. To place distance between myself and the things closest to my heart. That’s what clever people do, right? Try to sidestep suffering by thinking their way around it.
Grief, for a long time, felt like something I was supposed to keep close. I thought if I held it long enough, it would turn into depth—or a kind of moral high ground. But it only filled the rooms I needed empty. I mistook pain for purpose. I confused the weight of it with worth. I wore resentment like armor, hoping it would shield me, but all it did was make me cold. It cost me the sweetness I once carried so easily.
I’ve come to understand that letting go isn’t always a sign of strength. Sometimes, it rises from pure exhaustion—from realizing that clinging to truth like a banner doesn’t fix what’s broken. You can be right about everything and still feel hollow. You can carry valid anger and still decide to meet yourself with grace instead. That’s the turning point.
I crossed paths with a man—he shared that he’d forgiven someone who never sought it. He told me forgiveness was something he had to give, not because it was deserved, but because the bitterness was starting to solidify inside him. Our bones can’t bear that kind of burden, he said.
He wasn’t a poet, but when he spoke, his voice cracked like a prayer clawing its way into the open. I think about him when I find myself holding grudges like lifelines. I think about how truth sometimes comes with dirt under its nails. Maybe he knew what I kept circling until the years made it unavoidable: that anger isn’t just mourning—it’s resisting the shape of that mourning. It’s trying to keep it from changing you. It’s failing—and fighting that failure.
What I wanted most was to meet the moment without trying to reshape what lay outside my control. To offer compassion even to those who never asked for it—not because it made me noble, but because I was simply worn out. Worn out from interpreting their silences. Worn out from clutching at their deeds like debts I had never incurred. In the end, it became clear that I must let it slip from my weary hands, as one releases a fading dream.
We’re taught to believe time heals. But time alone doesn’t do much unless you’re willing to show up for the work. You have to unlearn the rhythms of your pain. Understand that closure isn’t owed to you in words—it comes from the choices you make. No fanfare. No fireworks. Just a pull toward something gentler. A longing for more. And that longing—that’s what’s holy.
Time doesn’t heal—that’s our excuse for all the waiting. Time doesn’t sew up wounds; you have to do that yourself, with hands that shake. You must unravel the story you’ve been rehearsing about what they did or didn’t do. You have to be willing to move forward without their apology as your ticket.
I think healing is subtler than we imagine. It’s the decisions made behind closed doors, the inner dialogue when there’s no audience. That’s not time’s job—it’s yours. You heal by continually returning to yourself; by carefully loosening the beliefs that once kept you safe, and beginning to see how they now keep you small.
Hope, too, moves in whispers. In my language, esperança—a word that suggests not merely waiting, but enduring that wait with a kind of muted fidelity—is nothing like the bold, cinematic spectacle we so often try to make of it. It does not descend like thunder or blaze like a hush of colors in the night sky; rather, it arrives almost imperceptibly, a hesitant ember in the vast dusk of uncertainty—something so slight and trembling that one might overlook it entirely were it not for the way it insists on being held close, cupped lovingly in the hollows of our hands. Protected not by force, but by tenderness. And perhaps that is its greatest miracle: that even when we are splintered by doubt or exhaustion, we still lean over it, breathe into it, and believe—without parade, without applause—that it will keep burning.
There is a piercing, just-about-unbearable truth in impermanence—the fragile spin between what lingers and what slips away. Even the most exquisite beauty, even the deepest sorrow, is subject to time’s gentle erasure: flowers wither, skin ages, moments dissolve into memory. Yet, as Proust might suggest, hope does not dwell in some distant tomorrow, but in the involuntary return of sensation—the sudden, unbidden awakening of presence. The roughness of bread’s crust beneath one’s fingertips, the ghostly imprint of bare feet on a cold, hard floor, the tenuous instant when we gaze into a face, believing it might finally turn to us—there, in that pause held between heartbeats, lies hope’s velvet ache.
Hope, then, is not a triumphant resolution, but that delicate invitation to revisit, through the faint stirring of perception, what seemed beyond reach. The chance for a warmth long thought lost to reappear—unannounced and unexpected. It is in the soft arrival of words—not a violent tempest, but a wistful snowfall, each flake a slow, deliberate falling that chills and soothes in equal measure. In this reserved, as-if-by-instinct unfolding, hope endures—not as an assertion of what must be, but as a patient yielding to what might still be.
I don’t think of hope as something we grasp or summon at will. I think of it as something that, without our noticing, holds us—like a thread we didn’t know had been woven through us all along. We don’t manufacture esperança; we recognize its devoted presence—the way one might suddenly catch a familiar melody humming low beneath the noise of a difficult day, or feel a hand finding ours just as weariness sets in. Hope has nothing to do with optimism; it asks for no bright promises. It is what lingers after we have made peace with the worst—the steady refusal to grow numb, the tender insistence that, even now—even now—something tiny and luminous might still rise.
As time, in its ceaseless currents, bears us onward, there steals upon us a poignant revelation: that the expectations we once clung to with such certainty were but gossamer veils of illusion, born of our faith in purpose and the dazzling tides of joy. We gaze, in that dim-lit astonishment, upon the discovery that where we had anticipated cruelty, a message had slumbered for countless days, awaiting the ripening of our understanding. And likewise, within what we mistook for indifference, we find—as in a fading dusk—a hidden spring of meaning, where empathy had long lain in repose. What once felt like hardness gives way to a more merciful, more sincere apprehension of the human heart.
When, at length, I let go, it did not come with a grand crescendo—no hallelujah, no burst of luz¹, no glittering cannon of release. It was quieter than that: like tears falling silently in the kitchen as the kettle murmured its calm boil; like writing their name at last without feeling compelled to encircle it in sorrow. It was grace, yes—but not the loud grace of hymns and victory. The other kind. The grace that seeps slowly into the marrow, asking nothing, proving nothing, simply being. It was neither comfortable nor poetic. Forgiveness did not descend upon me as a gift. I became it, little by little, in the thin breath of ordinary days, through the stubborn, inwardly made choice to stop bleeding for someone who perhaps never even knew they had wounded me—because I choose, still, to believe that no one would do so with intent. Or at least, I know I wouldn’t.
I am learning, in due course, neither to soften the truth nor to sharpen it—neither to polish it for approval nor to strip it bare for effect. Only to carry it, as far as it walks beside me—and then, with reverence, to set it down where it teaches me to rest. And let me say this: I did not do it to be good. I did it to be free. I craved that open and unclaimed expanse where I might, without need for defense or disguise, take pride in the innocence I had preserved—the rawness I had not learned to mask, the plain and fervent wish to be met without resistance. I wanted to honor the courage it took to raise my voice, to shout into the world’s vastness in the unsullied hope that someone might truly hear, might truly see. I had to build room within myself to praise that audacity—the naive, resplendent belief that words could leave a mark, stir a heart, shift even a fraction of the air.
And thus, gradually, I welcomed the inevitable encroachment of humility—through my faltering attempts to express what I meant; through those moments when my subtlest self, unbeknownst to me, came forth swathed in too many ornaments; and through the inherent misjudgments that clothed my words in a second skin I had not crafted.
I needed to perceive my place within the unfathomable architecture of things—not to be diminished by its immensity, but to remain intact within it, unshrunken. To behold my honest efforts, my impossible battles, the causes I lost not for lack of care, but because they exceeded the reach of what one heart alone could carry. And still, to look upon all of it and say: This was me, trying. To stand beside what I treasure without letting the shadow of failure drape itself over my shoulder. I deserved, if nothing else, to feel unashamed for having loved with such extravagant generosity—love bold in its vulnerability, threaded with a thousand golden attentions—and yet, in some cruel twist of fate, left to wonder if it had been too much… or simply not enough. To see it misunderstood, refracted into something I never intended.
But above all, it wasn’t done in the name of virtue. I wasn’t striving to be honorable. I did it because the heaviness had grown unbearable. Because I wanted to laugh without feeling an old bruise echo back. Because I was ready—finally—to come home to myself. I needed my voice again—my own voice, unwarped by resentment. I sought wholeness. Not the curated, polished kind, but the kind earned in private: through tears, through years, through the searing defiance of choosing softness over safety, peace over proof.
I was enlightened by the realization that to forgive is to encounter again the old, melancholy refrain of a once-cherished song—and to feel no sharpness, no wrenching of the soul—only the gentle weaving of the melody’s thread, as if no pause, no rupture had ever broken its flow, with the interlude’s anguish softly subsumed into the whole. It is limitless and unbounded, like a star-strewn sky—life-defining in ways language can scarcely touch.
I’ve been riding the shifting waves of time, and in their undulations, found myself returning—tentatively, haltingly—to writing, to self, to the slender braid of connection with others. There is a strange gravity to silence; it thickens the longer it is kept, as if each unspoken day settles like dust upon the spirit, even when the heart, unspeaking, holds fast to what it knows.
For a stretch of seasons, I feared that to name my pain would be to render it theatrical—as though dressing a small wound in the brocade of solemn words. But slowly, I have come to see that even the faintest murmur of heartache harbors its own validity, its right to be acknowledged. Wounds are never truly visible from without; their dimensions belong to the inner world.
No further do I regard forgiveness as a radiant act granted from above, but rather as something humbler and more intimate—drawn forth from the darker folds of the self. Less a gift bestowed than a form shaped inside, like sea-glass sculpted by the tides: sanded down not only by time, but by the churn of remembrance and the slow abrasion of grief.
There is a peculiar weight in those moments of writing—an unveiling, almost, of the secret chambers within us where words have long been reluctant to wander; places where what we have kept from even our own eyes begins to rise like a whispered breath. The echo I had yearned for—the elusive mirror—I realized was already there, and I stood within its fragile frame.
Forgiveness does not reveal itself as a stark demarcation between right and wrong, but as a tangled, tender unraveling of the soul’s weariness: an implicit admission—I no longer need you to understand the depth of what I endured, nor will I continue dragging its heavy shadow behind me. I am simply weary—not brave, not enlightened—merely weary of the countless ways the wound has asked to be felt, and felt again.
And so, I set it down—not because the sorrowing ceased its persistent thrum, but because the longing to live fully outshines the need to prove a point. Even if they did feel it—even if remorse blossomed in them like late spring—it wouldn’t deliver me. For the mirror I extended myself to grasp, and the echo I summoned—vainly—from the silence, were always just me: staring back, stretching out, waiting to be enough.
Perhaps that too is justice—nuanced, infinite, and unyielding—the truest justice of all.
If you, dear reader, are in that impossible space between knowing and acting, between the ache and the answer—let this be the sign you didn’t know you were waiting for. That yes, it’s okay to put the hurt down. Not to pretend it didn’t happen, but to say: this does not get to hold the pen anymore. You take it back. You write the next line.
And I can only assure you that the light, intricate in its modesty, emerges at last—as if from beneath the density of gloom. Always. So today, I’m letting hope be still and unremarkable: a glass of water, a walk, the sound of leaves moving, as if someone were coming. As if something were already near.
With amor—Portuguese for love—which, to me, means choosing to honor the good even in the thick of the fight.
T.L.O.
P.S. Much has remained unwritten, cradled in the stillness where words seem to draw back—wary of being too much, too soon.
I’ll return, in time, to continue this thread—from forgiveness, which first allowed me to glimpse that true empathy, in its earliest bloom, asks not only that we feel, but that we learn to bow—with dignity and grace—to the equal, twinned labor that follows: the offering of apology.
P.S.S. …no burst of luz¹
¹ Luz means light in both Portuguese and Spanish.
This essay reads like a whole book.
I loved it and now plan to slow read one paragraph a day as part of my morning contemplation. Often you write what is in my heart already but this time you wrote what I most need to learn - what my heart yearns to hear (except the part where you say to name the pain feels theatrical, that’s right out of my own playbook).
Forgiveness drags itself into the room, exhausted and ready to lay down arms without fanfare. We need to hear this because it seems we expect it will be different.
Thaissa, you should be very proud of this piece. I can only imagine how difficult it was to write. Thank you for giving us this gift.
I feel like I’m watching you transform in this space, and I’m honored to bear witness. 🤍