danger

when she confronted me, i told her what i'd done.  i was living honestly by that time- plunged into a deep pool of brutal truth that i never wanted to resurface from.  i told my best friend what i had done.  by then it was long over- even the thought had passed. i had shelved the whole ordeal with large bits of other things i justified at the time and forgot easily later.  telling her was like reporting something awful that had happened in the news.  how very sad for some people out there somewhere- but hardly reaching me.

it hardly seemed like me anymore at all.  but it had been me.  it was me.  it didn't matter that everything was different now, or that i was sorry, or that it hadn't meant much at all (even at the time), or that it had only gone so far.  none of that mattered much at all.

i saw her face- the "how could you?" unspoken

and maybe that is why-
maybe that is why-
because although i can't always be as good to people as i'd like to think i can be, at the very least i can avoid being cruel.  it's not so difficult, really.  it's impossible to avoid causing some amount of hurt, but it's easy to avoid a whole slew of them.  the big ones- the obvious ones.

so i do.  i avoid hurting others in those big, avoidable ways.

there is no god to say, "shame on you,"
but there are plenty of people and hearts that i love who might say, "how could you?" with their eyes

because my best friend said that to me once-
and i didn't have an answer

and because i have said that to someone too.

there is no judge in the sky to reward me for all the unseen discipline
but there is a judge in my heart
and a world full of hearts that-
pathetic as we are-
don't deserve to be broken
by me.

that is why.