forgiveness

It hurts, he thought, and he would have buried his face in his knees and clenched his eyes shut against the rough denim if it would help, but it wouldn't. The ache wouldn't leave.

More than the sting of metal biting into his wrists, it hurt to know that he'd been wrong; he'd done something wrong.

Whether that was doing something considered wrong in the first place, or not doing the wrong thing well enough to not get caught, he didn't know, didn't care. He'd either done the deed wrong or had simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time, it didn't matter. Either way, it hurt.

It hurt, and the gray walls were a constant reminder of that pain, always half-of-the-seconds-he-had-left from closing in on him no matter how many seconds passed.

He could have been better. All the different things he could have done to lead to different circumstances than where he was now—the roads untraveled haunted him.

It didn't have to have been this way; the decisions he'd made had lead him here.

Wrong decisions, he could affirm now, but the future was always murky and prone to delusion while hindsight was always twenty-twenty, once-obscured perceptions suddenly so sharply defined that it hurt.

And he would have buried his face in his knees and clenched his eyes shut against the rough denim to block it out but it wouldn't help, the concrete pressing cold against his spine, the bottoms of his feet, the bones that ached from sitting, and he could close his eyes but his wrists were chained together and he couldn't cover his ears and the gray walls were screaming at him.

You were wrong you were wrong you were wrong you were wrong you werewro ngyouw erewrongyou werewrongyouwerewrongyouwerewrongyouwere—

He was wrong, and he thought of Jenga blocks, how one wrong move could bring the whole tower toppling down.

He'd made a wrong move, and the Jenga blocks of his life had been scattered and buried like bodies in a graveyard, marked with headstones that were all that was left to tell the story of his life.

His mistakes were buried, and he could leave them there, but there was nothing else to do in the cemetery of his mind but dig them up and chew on them like a dog, leaving them marred with toothmarks and stripped of blood and flesh.

Freshly mutilated, nearly beyond recognition, he could bury them again somewhere more aesthetic, more hidden, and leave the tombstone epitaphs incorrectly labeling empty coffins and slowly weathering away with the rain and the moss and the rot and the decay and the passage of time that left nothing unchanged.

Slowly, he forgot.