Originally published September 10, 2026

written by jonathan miranda cuevas, citizen journalist
edited and newly formatted by sharon burns
originally formatted by justin orsino

There is a kind of mercy that only works if you can manage to extend it, and most of us cannot. It goes like this: Someone hurt you. Badly, specifically, in a way that shaped everything after it. And somewhere along the way you are asked, gently, by no one in particular, to consider that the person who hurt you was also living for the first time. That they did not have a draft of their life to revise. That the version of them who failed you did not know, could not have known, what failing you would cost, because none of us know that at the moment we are doing the failing.

It sounds like a platitude until life asks you to live it. Then it becomes one of the hardest things a person can do.

I think about the way love is inherited crooked. Not the trauma itself, exactly, but its shape. A father who can only reach his children through a lens, through the work, through some third thing placed between his hands and their faces because direct contact was never modeled for him and now he does not trust his own hands to do it. He loves them. Love is not the problem. 

The problem is

that it arrives

at an angle,

and children raised on angled love learn to receive love at an angle too, bracing for it even when it is real, unable to take it straight on because straight on was never how it came.

It does not distribute evenly among siblings, this inheritance, even when the childhood looks identical from the outside. One child stands between the noise and everyone else, absorbing the force of it, and grows up bearing a wound the others do not carry in quite the same place. Another child, spared the direct blow, develops something else instead: a hypervigilance, a fluency in reading every room for what is about to go wrong. This looks like health, but it’s not. It is merely a different architecture built from the same collapse. Ask two people who grew up in the same house why one of them turned out steady and the other did not, and you may hear something like, “We did not have the same childhood. I had you standing in front of me.”

The house itself keeps the record when the people in it will not. There is a crack somewhere, structural and old, the kind of damage that has been there long enough to stop registering as damage and start registering as simply how the walls are. Everyone in the family circles it. Nobody repairs it. And eventually the house gets sold, and the new owners renovate, and the crack disappears under fresh paint and a modern palette that erases everything the walls used to hold. The new owners will feel something heavy in certain rooms and never learn why. They will have an argument in the room where something happened and wonder afterward why that particular room felt different. The wound does not end because a family finally lets go of the house. 

It just finds new

walls to live inside.

There is a popular idea that prayer is what you do once you have given up on handling things yourself, an admission of defeat dressed as devotion. I understand the appeal of that argument and I do not think it survives contact with how people actually break. Every person I have watched try to carry the whole weight alone, refusing help, refusing softness, treating self-sufficiency as a kind of integrity, has been the one who ends up most shattered. The armor is not protection. It is what keeps you from the very thing you are bracing to survive without. Whatever grace finally arrives, when it arrives, does not come from finally managing everything correctly on your own. It comes after you stop and let something in after spending years refusing on principle.

I think about my own mother more than I probably let on. I fill a glass of water for her nightstand some nights and I look at her face and I see a sadness that has been there longer than I have been alive to witness it. I know I am folded into that sadness somewhere, not entirely responsible for it but not entirely separate from it either. My father left. She raised us without him. She is the kindest person I have ever been given, and there are things I have felt toward her that I cannot fully justify and cannot fully name, and I have wanted, more than once, to give her a certain kind of smile, the one that says all of it is forgiven. Finished, and behind us. But something in me will not let me smile like that. It’s not hatred that’s preventing me. Not even grievance, exactly. Something older, structural, like the crack that was in the walls before I knew to go looking for it.

The wrong question is

whether I can forgive.

There may be nothing left in the ledger that actually requires forgiving, not in the way the word usually means. The harder question, the one I keep circling and not quite reaching, is whether the people I have kept at a distance will ever have reason to forgive me. For the bracing. For the angle. For all the smiles I meant and still could not make myself give.

The house gets sold eventually. The crack gets painted over. And somewhere, in a room none of us live in anymore, the weight is still deciding which walls to move into next.