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// Step Nineteen: Forgive Yourself 
// Story: How to Forget Happiness 
// by LyraAlluse 
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Step Nineteen: Forgive Yourself


Let this eat at you a few years. Let it tear a hole in your heart that cannot easily be mended by the empty words of comfort spoken to you by your university students, colleagues, family or friends. Let it make you appreciate the life she has given you, through the sacrifice of her own.

Visit her grave sometime during the summer when you have time off. Read her the one poem you never had the courage to recite. The one about an old stallion that could talk to his guardian angel. The one that was crammed between the pages of an otherwise Goth-filled portfolio of crap. The one that takes you back to the days when you’d read all of the poems in your journals to her, and hesitate every time you tried to draw it out of the pages of that stale, lifeless folder.

Don’t cry; she wouldn’t want to see you cry. Lay the poem on her grave with a smile. As you walk away, promise yourself that you will never come back. As you get in your car, watch the wind blow the poem from the top of the grave into the hands of an aspiring poet sitting on a park bench. Watch her as she reads it and a large grin creeps over her face. Be reminded of the reason you became a writer in the first place.