Member-only story
Why Is It So Hard To Remember How To Forget?
If forgetting is easy, the sum of life will become null and void
Forgetting is hard. For me, it’s almost entirely impossible. I leave pieces of myself everywhere I go, and there, I stay. Like a plant, I develop roots that hold onto the ground of those places from once upon a time.
Of course I forget — sometimes. Selectively perhaps. I forget about tasks and appointments. Faces of people I met. I’m hopeless with names, and don’t get me started with birthdays, anniversaries, and milestones. Importance is entirely irrelevant. But who’s to decide what is important? For whom and when?
I remember the smell of a torrential downpour falling from the dark clouds above. The time he wrapped his arms tight around me as if the storm might carry me away in its invisible currents. My thoughts stopped. A mental snapshot was taken in that nanosecond; I am forever locked in that frame.
I remember the wind eddied and swirled, lifted my hair into a dance while my heart was breaking, fracture by fracture. Grief choked the breath from my body. I recall everything from the soft bluish tinge of the grass to the way they sway in the rhythmic wave of that late summer evening.
