The Long Road with Time

I met Pain early on the road.

It did not shout or strike again,

it simply walked beside me.

 

Unforgiveness followed soon after, a quiet companion with a long memory.

 

Time came last.

 

Time did not hurry us forward

as I had once believed it would.

It only walked the same slow road with patient steps.

 

For years we travelled like this,

Pain pointing often to the place

where the road had broken,

Unforgiveness refusing the bridge

that others said I ought to cross.

 

Time said very little.

 

Sometimes I thought it was waiting for something.

Sometimes I thought it had forgotten me entirely.

 

Yet the seasons turned around us.

Grass rose and fell along the path.

Storms came and passed again.

 

And still we walked.

 

There are wrongs the earth itself seems to remember…

 

broken trust, wrongs no hand can set right,

griefs that settle deep in the timber of a life.

 

For such wounds

Time walks beside us slowly.

 

Sometimes it simply keeps us company.

 

But one morning, years along the road,

another figure appeared ahead.

 

Forgiveness.

 

Not standing tall like a judge,

nor calling loudly for my attention.

 

Only waiting quietly

at a bend in the path.

 

Pain did not leave me then.

Unforgiveness did not vanish.

 

They stood beside me still.

 

But the road seemed wider somehow.

 

And Time… who had walked so patiently with us…

stepped forward as if it had known all along

 

that Forgiveness would one day arrive not to erase the journey, but to loosen the weight of carrying it alone.