I forgive my rapists, approximately. I don’t forgive the guards.

I would transform myself, emerge as a chimera of humanity and luminous vibration—and pain, too. Be what cannot be, what no one can be: in ecstatic love with everyone, with love itself and every uplift of petal, thorn, leaf and stem. All terrible beauty, too, in the face of ordinary horror and grief, and especially in defiance of injustice. Such inside-outness, such generosity of spirit and surrender to compassion would require unstinting forgiving, and forgiveness.

I would surrender all ambition, my hope of reputation in the wider world, if I could find such forgiveness and forgiving, in me and for me. But I would also give my life, instantly, for justice for all boys who are beaten and assaulted when young, as I was. So how does this work?

Since my daughter Molly died I love better. I am more awake to others, to how common tragedy is. I soothe, listen, and comfort, imperfectly. Humbled, because I too have done wrong, was wrong, was asleep. Awake now to how I neglected another’s dignity, stained my honor—not violent, but wrong, careless with others, when I was young and stupid. I’ve been on guard ever since and always, ready to face anyone, ready for their choices, their judgement. Ready. It is the only way to go forward when we do wrong: to make a morning-after pledge and keep it. Keep it with effort and diligence, the only way that works. Do-right, from this moment on. Especially for a child who needs you.

I made those efforts so when at last I was confronted I was honest, and faced them, and was forgiven, approximately. And now I face the terrible question.
If I am forgiven, how do I also forgive? With my eyes open, a calm grief in me, I can’t help but see: our one life requires kindness, no matter what we lose. We love one another today, or else scratch our name in the sand, over and over, forever, blind to others. If I ask for and accept forgiveness, I must give it.
But to those boys who toyed with me, raped me, scarred me?

Yes. I must. Some brittle and thin forgiveness — it slips between my fingers at times — but real, at last. Don’t mistake what a mess it was, still is. For decades I tore into their ghosts, cowered from them, hissed hatred at those boys, late at night. But I feared most the shadowy guards beyond the cell’s steel door, feared even imagining them. Seized by dread of them even in bright light, under the noonday sun. As if it’s a given that I’m in a cell forever, waiting for the dark corners to cohere into a rapist, and could not yet see that someone was on the other side of the door. The true villains. As if rape was a flash that went off and I was set into a form, a posture of fear and watchfulness, blind to anything beyond the flash.

A lifelong shape of terror created by corrupt jail staff, I see now. Those boys were actors, paid off with power, orgasms, sadistic fulfillment. Understand, I do not simply displace my rage from boys to guards. I exhausted my imagination, the fantasy confrontations and tortures, against those boys, for thousands of nights, over decades. Not utterly or finally, but eventually it does not satisfy to simply hate the curs locked in with you. I finally saw, in my fifties, the hand in the darkness beyond, and it held keys. When the last of my children were grown, I lost enough fear of those guards to see them, the men who locked me in with rapists, and how the battlefield was not in that small cell but in the world outside. A world that permits evil men to hurt children.

This is the messy way of it, why it takes decades — if we survive — to process barbarous trauma. If we don’t succumb to drink and drugs, to self-destruction, it’s because we learn to present a tableaux vivant of normal — but we fear and hate, and expect, endlessly, a return of that white hot flash, to be blinded again, injured again. It takes a while — decades, for me — to identify the rage. Then we hate again and again, over and over, making us sick. Perhaps we hate light itself, at times. It takes years for the afterimage of cruelty to fade, for our sight to return, to sort what was us, before. What we might have been. To understand what we lost, what we became, after rape.

So must I forgive those guards, the staff who permitted and protected assaults on young boys, on me?

How does that work? Perhaps I can prepare to forgive. Perhaps if I see them some day in a courtroom, and they confess. I try to imagine forgiving them; I get nowhere. This ruins me, my failure to radiate forgiveness right now in every direction, without exception, into every dark place.

Unfairness has nothing to do with it. If I alone do right and they do not — I confess all my own sins, ready for any question, any memory, to face all regret and shame — really ready, no hiding or pretending, to be condemned or forgiven — or both — to surrender to justice, because I did wrong ? to do simply what is right, to understand that all offense against humanity and dignity cannot be scaled, that smal loss is still loss? to not excuse myself because my errors were “small”? What I must do, that is, to be humble enough to forgive all others, because I must not add dishonor to dishonor, injury to injury, and must be honest about every imperfection and error, to everyone.

Because life requires kindness, no matter what we lose.

But how do I let go of those guards? Release them, in my heart, when no one holds them accountable, no one ever has? If they still live they probably retired in honor and comfort. Their victims in 1970, in St. Louis — dozens, hundreds? — are mostly lost, in prison, dead. I must not forget my heart’s desire to be a compassionate soul, will not forget blessed redemption for me and them, the glory and beauty of extending genuine forbearance for all who wrong us, or others, or themselves. I do not forget what it might grant in me: a peace of mind, an ease in my heart, at last, at last.

But I do not forget, will never forget being trapped, having someone and something in me, the white hot flash , the surgical repair after, the malformed life ever since— and how at fourteen, an age of misperception and fantasy, of not knowing how far, or when or if it will end. The threat of death was explicit; it is a branding, still. I remember the tearing, the blood, the screams. I remember how they made me take part. I remember the over and over of it, for five days.

I remember the boy who was there before me, trapped in that cell. I remember the boy who came after me, even younger, and his vacant eyes, dead soul, afterwards, out in the cold, grey yard.

I could act like I forgive. I am good at it, at acting like a regular guy, a good person, an innocent, for forty years. Could pretend to have some kind of forgiveness in me for those guards. It would be uplifting for you, dear reader, and cost me so little, no? Words, prepared and typed, ’s all that is. Would I then become that lovingkindness gender I truly am, that forgiven and forgiving man, natural at last? Stumble my way forward, face all other injuries, all parties and all errors, love all who need me, who ask of me, and remain in the flow of compassion, from and to, forever. Yes?

I can’t lie. It does not work that way.

It is possible that I do have forgiveness for them in me, but I don’t know where it is. Or rather, I feel for it as if groping for something beloved, lost in a pond, some lovely, soft, reflective thing, a comfort for all, to be patted dry and treasured, shared with everyone — but all I find so far are sodden leaves and muck, rot and brambles. And bones. Everywhere, bones.

I choose love, nonetheless. Molly, the daughter I raised, who died too young, would want me to. I choose the path towards generosity, for even the possibility of redemption someday.

And because I made promises. I can’t go to the steps of the Missouri Department of Prisons and set myself on fire, though I want to; some days it is all I think about. I can’t give up, or get lost. I can’t succumb. I want to, but I promised Molly. “Don’t be a sad sack, papa,” she told me.

I would love this old world, if I could find enough forgiveness, for me, for them, for everyone. Unconditional, transcendent, love for everyone — my true identity, my real gender, at last — if only for a moment.

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