prompt: win, title: taking the w in misc. flash fiction

The knife is still in you. Metaphorically, the knife is still in your side, it has been for years and decades now. You have gotten used to it. To the extent that one can heal with a blade lodged in their guts, you have healed around it but you have not healed. The parts of you that were in the place that the knife still sits cannot heal true because there’s still a goddamn knife in there. You may want to even believe that it is just a part of you now, after all these years, you think you’ve adjusted, you believe you’ve integrated it into your whole with a “w”, but it really is just a hole with a “h” in your side. In your heart. In your soul. You’re flesh and blood and bones and spirit. The dagger’s metal and metal and metal and metal. You’ll never integrate a spike that wounded you into you. It will forever be a foreign body in your form. The knife is still in you. Pull it out.

Letting go is a hell of a thing, of course, and I’m certainly a hypocrite in telling you to no longer be a living sheath for someone else’s weapon, but then again, there are things you can only learn from the pain of that hypocrisy. There are unhealed spaces inside me, lodged with a rusting steel that may as well be the Excalibur of grief, that have been there for over thirty years, that I’ve no idea how to extricate without bleeding my soul out in the process. Physician, heal thyself. That’s easy to say but it is damnably difficult in practice. Still, it is the only way you’ll heal. Pull it out.

Forgiveness is fine for those who wound you if they’re actually contrite, actually trying to make amends, but in the end, letting go isn’t about them. It’s about that knife they left inside you. It is about opening up the chasm where it sits so that your body may slowly knit itself together again.

The knife is still in you. As long as it is knit into the mangled web of sinew that used to be you, it just keeps festering. This isn’t about them, in the end. It’s about letting go of something that isn’t you. You are not forgiving the person or people who did this to you, if you manage to extricate it, and it’s certainly not about you winning or losing or them winning or losing. Winning and losing are imaginary idiotic things rich people use to distract us from making this brief life better for all.

The knife is still in you. The sword’s in the stone, babydoll. Removing the blade is not forgiving them for assaulting you. Removing the blade is forgiving yourself for receiving the wounds. You cannot discover how glorious you still can be until you are whole with a “w”. Physician, forgive yourself. Pull that sonofabitch out and heal. Allow yourself wholeness.