Trust and Forgetting

The luxury liner sank and I swam into the deepest region of the oceans and found the Walrus there, a fellow creature not indigenous to the area. He was bathing in the bathtub of regret, but took the time to look at me, through his coke bottle glasses as I asked him my question.

He was smoking a dove tailed joint with a paperclip stabbed through the end and exhaled the statement: We cannot forgive others for their actions, only ourselves. Especially, when it was you that brought this on yourself. The deeper you swim, the more it will hurt your lungs; oh, Othello, Moor of Venice, you of all people should know this. You should be swimming into the Shallows and enjoying what you have.

But I had left Isis on the shoreline and found the tallest building in the ocean and flung myself from it, enjoying, for the briefest of moments the sensation of flying and that what I was doing was morally right. That in order to build something fresh, you need a foundation of solid bedrock.
But after 28 years of falling, I only found that there wasn't a bottom, only a creature named Despair. He took me in and fed me bangers and pancakes in the afternoon. At night he hung himself from the same rope as he'd done the night before only woke in the morning to do it all again.

In the Wallow, I knew that there was more to life than this. More than keeping old messages in a conch shell and never calling them back. More than waiting for a tidal wave to wash over us all and the sins away. More than desperately wanting to desperately want.

And in this time of need, I thought of what the Preacher man said, To forgive is to forget and I took comfort in those words. But, then again, perhaps we're supposed to listen to the Zealot: It will never be the truth, if you don't believe.