Forgiveness

There's a post on Mad Melancholic Feminista about forgiveness and (sibling) relationships. It made me think about forgiveness in my own life.
It's an issue I've been grappling with for a while now -- it simply doesn't come easily to me. The way I see it, forgiveness is, by and large, a tool I use to be able to justify the existence or creation of a context which either does actually exist or which I want to have exist.
There are times when I don't even have the slightest desire to forgive. Usually, when that happens, it's simply because I’m afraid that forgiving might involve forgetting, and that forgetting might involve allowing an encore which is not something I would like to have to deal with no matter now many ‘mights’ would have to find their way into reality before that happened.
There are other times when I think that it is beyond me to be able to forgive primarily because anger or pain get in the way although my ability to set those feelings aside seems to depend on who the other person involved is — like most people, I suppose, I can forgive almost anything in those I love.
Although, then again, there are those whom my inability to forgive has ultimately caused me to stop caring for. What seems strange is that I don't have to care about a person to somehow find a way to forgive them. What I need to be able to forgive is to want to be able to see that person playing a part in my life, however small, at some point in the future. And if I want to be able to see that in my mind's eye, I am willing to ignore reality.