Forgetfulness

Is there room for forgetfulness?

Sometimes we go through life carrying and dragging the memories of past lives. Of moments and happy days.

Of gray days.

Of people who are no longer in our lives.

Of lives we no longer live.

Until one day, suddenly, they vanish—like you never had them. They dissolve as you walk.

Everything continues.

Everything moves on.

You move, and life moves with you.

The days go by.

Life goes by.

We keep moving through the act of living. Creating new memories. Meeting new people. Collecting moments.

Affections.

Scents.

Places.

And then suddenly, like a strong thunder, that memory or that image, that smell… pierces your soul and it all comes back. Like it was never erased.

It never left.

So what is forgetfulness, then?

Is forgetfulness the penance we carry as a consequence of feelings?

Of living?

Is this penance the result of wanting, of loving, of trying again?

Sitting on a park bench, I looked up and saw a sign with a word. That word opened a flood of memories. Memories buried so deep they scared me.

One word.

How much power that word held.

I don’t know if forgetfulness plays with fate to make us stumble. To make us look back. To make us pause. To make us remember.

And yes, I remembered. Everything that had been locked away for weeks came rushing back. One word.

Maybe among all the things we can’t control, memories are one of them. Forgetting something in a world determined to make us relive the past and to look back, to long. That kind of nostalgia that creeps out at night and slips into people like dew. Always there, waiting for its moment.

Talking with a friend about this idea of forgetting, he said: That’s exactly what I was reflecting on yesterday—how hard it is to force yourself to forget.

To force yourself to forget… How would we even do that? Can someone tell me?

Have you seen the movie Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind…? If you haven’t… SPOILERS! There’s a part in the film where the protagonist hides the memories of his love in other unrelated memories so he won’t forget her. So he can treasure her in the hidden corners of his mind. Hoping the machine doesn’t erase anything about her. He’s made sure she exists in all his memories. In his entire life.

We forget… but not really, I think. We put it to sleep, let it rest. We store it away, lock it up. We cover it with new memories as we go on living and creating. We keep pushing it all down into the abyss that lives inside us.

Until one day, the threads of life reconnect and we remember again. And bam! Like Dagda playing her harp, the memory reappears. Fresh as ever.

It seems, at least to me, that forgetfulness isn’t entirely real. It’s temporary. Maybe along the way, we meet people who have managed to forget and move on like nothing happened.

While others (like me) are visited by memories that come back and live within us for a while. To remind us of the yes, the no, the what was… and above all, to remind us that we still feel. That we are alive.