TRANSCRIPT

I’m Maggie Smith, and this is The Slowdown.

I have plenty of faults, but holding grudges isn’t one of them. Even when someone hurts me deeply, once I’m past the sting and shock, I can find it in my heart to forgive them. That doesn’t mean I excuse their behavior, and it doesn’t mean I allow them continued access to me and keep them in my life. But I can let go and move on without malice.

The way I see it, we’re all only human. We hurt one another, often completely unintentionally. We do our best, but we still mess up sometimes. I mess up! And while I’m pretty quick to forgive someone who’s hurt me, I’m slow to forgive myself when I hurt someone else.

I think self-compassion is the most challenging kind of compassion. We are so hard on ourselves, aren’t we? We humans carry around so much guilt and shame. We ruminate about breakups and arguments. We think about the things we said in anger that we wish we could take back. We think about the things we didn’t say and wish we had. We replay the past despite being unable to change it.

The speaker of today’s poem confesses something — and in doing so, with self-compassion and self-forgiveness, sets it down.

What I Wanted to Keep Private
by Melissa Crowe

I wanted you last night when I woke, my body
vibrating like train-shook ground, and might have

let out the train’s slow scream, the kind that quickens
as the beast draws near, but I wanted to keep private

that desire and that fear. Once, I transgressed
but I’m not a permanent monster  is a thing a friend

said to comfort me for some sin of my own,
but in the dark that phrase travels me like a pulse, 

shocking each cloistered organ in turn. When I was 
fifteen, I took my grandmother’s gold necklace

and gave it to a sweetheart, bit of shimmer
that graced my favorite neck until it slipped off,

sunk in the silt of a summer lake, lost, and I lost
the sweetheart, too, but I carried the lead-weight

shame of that theft, secret, until now. I don’t feel
any lighter. I don’t know what I might yet steal,

though I remember everything stolen from me, 
like the kitten loosed from our house in the morning

and by afternoon purring in the arms of a neighbor kid
who swaggered up the driveway, invited me

to stroke his new cat. It’s not so hard to forgive
that boy. Who doesn’t sometimes want to hold

a soft thing not his own? Who doesn’t hope
to know the sugar name that calls the handsome

stranger home? Anyway, I’m not alone. Once, 
I was the kind of monster who takes the gold

from one beloved throat to trim another. Once, 
I was the kind who hid the hunger that drives

my hand, as though only a said thing’s made
true. Now? I love you. I just want to be said.

"What I Wanted to Keep Private" by Melissa Crowe from ABIDER © 2026 Melissa Crowe. Used with the permission of The University of Pittsburgh Press.