Please Forgive Me...

Please forgive me...

I have come a long way in my journey to be. I am here now and I know what I must do, I must ask each of you that I’ve ever wronged to forgive me.

I’ve been coming to this for a long time. I have not been a person that was reliable, save for the consistency of my arrogance, my numbness to love, my god-awful pride and my misuse of friendship.

I need to do this and it won’t take me too long, though my sins are many, my victims unknown to the fog, the mist of my deadened slumber, my sorrow is found most in my lament from everyone I’ve affected by not bringing forth a full throated love.

This is for Michelle too, my wife, my lovely angel love, to whom I dance the most. I cannot make up for what I’ve done or haven’t done in my life, I can only pray that I’ll be forgiven.

I should begin with 1984, the year that brought me to my beginning, a reset of my clock. That year, a child was born, my child, my daughter Chelsea whom I didn’t get to know until she was fourteen. I wasn’t there to see her first fourteen birthdays. I missed everything because I made an awful choice. Three months later I was thrown out the back windshield of a car and slammed into the concrete. Tina Ryan died that night. I’ve done my best to recall those final moments to no avail. When my head met the ground I was unchained from who I had become in order to climb back up the mountain to who I truly am, to face my hazy transgressions, my entrenched fears and my fate.

I should have begun by seeking forgiveness, but instead, through the fog, I mirrored it upside down. I began from an unknown agony and rage, thus began my climb.

I do not remember most of my offenses to others with any real clarity, save for the guilt of the unknown and unknowable things that floated nearest me in my dreams, a cacophony of visions that have now led me back to 1984, 1983 and 1982, and beyond. I ask you to forgive me, friends, for that’s all I know in you. To Tina’s parents I pray they forgive me for any part I may have had in taking their daughter away (and this I will say to them in person). I have tried to recall that moment, that reckoning with the rain and the tree and the ground but it never comes, it’s wiped clean from out of any recall in me.

I have offended many and I’m willing to bet there’s more than have met my eyes. The numbers matter less than the truth behind these words now undisguised, the honesty of my guilt is as important to love’s call as the dishonesty that would have been found in never having uttered them at all.

These truths that have lived in me without perception, without hope of retrieval at their inception, are now demanding that I say something more heartfelt than my belief, more gut wrenching than any thing I’ve ever perceived, more needed than any of my thinking or a conscious shift or change, more than my talents could have ever arranged.

I abused the privilege of loving friends and family alike, I stayed bitter and angry for too many years. I had no idea I was cold with regret at having forgotten,
having had my memory taken away that night, and all the nights after- my college days at the U of A I’m rather sure are littered with stories about me that tell of a sorrow and rage, my kaleidoscope of emotions pouring out upon those I can’t begin to name. And my years at Southern Arkansas University seemed like an age spent recalling something inside of me that was out of control, a sadness finally surfacing to reveal my mask made from shame.

Nearly twenty-eight years later I find myself tumbling headlong into the paradise of my belief. So to you all, my friends, my sisters and my brothers, I am planting a new garden that we have yet to reap from the full love formed from our dance with one another…

Peace, love and goodness to you, yours and the (H)eartH of creation…

© 2012 by the spirits dancing, mark richard prime