Forgiveness · fiction
How to forgive myself for my mistakes
A story in the form of a letter from a forty-year-old Bolivian woman to the twenty-year-old girl she was, asking for forgiveness and offering it.
bairogonzalez.com team, drawing on Bairo's story · Published
A vision — a short story.
Dear twenty-year-old girl,
It's me. You, at forty. I'm writing from a small kitchen in a high city in Bolivia, where the air is so thin that words come out slowly. Maybe that's why it took me so long to write.
I want to ask your forgiveness. And I want to forgive you. I don't know which of the two is harder.
Do you remember the day you dropped out of architecture school? You were in your third year. You had designed a school for a community on the altiplano, with adobe walls and big windows to let the morning sun in. The professor said it was naive. That no one would build it. You believed him. And, even believing in your design, you gave up.
I spent twenty years angry at you for that.
Do you remember the man you married at twenty-three, even when your whole body said no? Do you remember the money you lent your cousin that never came back, so you couldn't pay for your son's school that year? Do you remember the times you kept quiet when you should have spoken, and the times you spoke when you should have kept quiet?
I remember them all. For years, they were my list. I went over it at night, item by item, like someone telling rosary beads backward.
Last night, going over the list, I had a vision.
I saw you, at twenty, sitting on your bedroom floor, the school design in your lap, crying. I saw that you didn't give up out of weakness. You gave up because you were alone. No one at home understood what architecture was. No one had ever studied. You were the girl who would go far, and you were going far without a map.
I saw you at twenty-three, on your wedding day. I saw that you were afraid of being alone forever, because that's what they told women who waited too long.
I saw you lending the money to your cousin because your cousin was crying and you never could bear to see anyone cry.
And I realized something. Every mistake on my list had a reason that I, at forty, could understand, and that you, at twenty, had no way of knowing. You didn't go wrong because you were bad. You went wrong because you were young, alone and too good.
Then the vision moved forward. I saw a sixty-year-old woman, me, writing a letter to this forty-year-old. She too asked my forgiveness and forgave me. She too had a list. And she too, in the end, tore up the list.
That's why I'm writing. To tear up mine.
I want you to know: the school you designed exists. Not that one, exactly. But, ten years ago, an NGO built, in a village near the lake, an adobe school with big windows for the sun. I went to see it. I stood at the door for a long time. Someone had had the same idea. You weren't wrong. You were just early.
And I want you to know something else. Last week, I enrolled in university again. Not architecture. Education. I want to teach children to draw schools.
I forgive you, girl. For the university, the marriage, the money, the silences. Forgive me for hating you so long.
With love, at last,
you.
Bairo says that, at one point in his life, he believed in an idea and, even believing, gave up, and that years later it became a trend. He kept the pain and the proof that he had seen far. Read: The sun is for everyone.
The way forward
Look at your mistakes with today's eyes and with the information you had at the time; there's almost always a human reason behind them. Write a letter to who you were and say what you needed to hear. Forgiving yourself doesn't erase the mistake; it gives you back the future.