I'm Major Jackson and this is the slowdown.

I'm Major Jackson and this is the slowdown. In his beautiful home in Portland, sharing us God to the glow of our reunion, I asked my friend

Michael about his sister Aileen.

They had not spoken in a decade. She was the one who introduced the two of us many years

ago in college. It paint me to hear. Aileen and he did not merely drift apart, but a rift broke out between them.

I wanted the conversation to end with him saying,

but we are figuring matters out.

Unfairly, I wanted him to forgive, for them to move on, a common

conclusion when hearing about tough times between family members.

As much as I admire people who can live in the present, I also understand those who retain a righteous indignation,

what Christian philosopher Thomas Aquinas calls a just and

zealous anger.

I'm thinking of an artist who will never forgive her father for his demeaning of her as a girl, an experience which was different

from that of her brother. She clings to her resentment for, as she reports, it subconsciously fuels her creativity.

I thought I avoided revenge out of laziness.

A physical toll is paid when I hold onto feelings of intense rage.

It's truly exhausting to hold that tension or that fire in my body.

I thought I was protecting my ease, but then while writing a poem about an

incident of joy writing, I recalled something long buried.

When I was 13, Eddie was older than me by five years.

He was a neighbor who was in and out of jail for selling drugs.

One day, he asked if I wanted to go for a ride around the neighborhood in a blue

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