What is a grudge? Even the sound is heavy, a combo of sludge and ground. Not the stuff of dancing, or leaping across the floor. 

Sometimes we package it in glossy paper, to convince ourselves that our decision long ago is still viable. We are righteous, or virtuous for holding our standards when others are weak. Wrong is wrong, a static boundary that has petrified into a barrier. 

But sometimes those absolutes give me license to stop thinking. Quit listening. Resist caring. 

I surprise myself, in the ways my clear partitions have become permeable. Yet at some point along the way the people I love urged me across enemy lines. It is not as risky as what those German soldiers did who stepped into no man's land on Christmas Eve in 1914. Plus some of them still died the next morning. 

Years ago a friend expressed her sadness about relationships that never recovered. Because of decisions that are older than my car, people no longer speak to her. 

I ache to think of how much is sacrificed in such a breach. It is not that I am without guilt. Those muddy thoughts with a facade of sanctimony have kept me from talking with someone I once cared for, and God willing I could embrace again. 

I will never be courageous enough to step into a field between the Allies and the Germans. But I can look into the eyes of people I once dismissed. Some relationships need not be casualties.