Forget About It

Do you know how many things we have forgotten? You can't possibly. You don't know until you're shown to have not known anymore, and by then the memories don't matter. There are bits and pieces of things now that can bring a memory back. A note, a picture, a message, a text. Something you'd completely let slip out of your mind.

It's interesting what it feels like to remember a forgotten promise. A promise you used to care about so much. I promised her I'd love her forever. And her and her and her. A line of broken promises, with good intent, yes, but still shattered the same. You begin to question your own integrity. Your constitution. Your resolve. Your reality. Then time takes these promises and melts them from a promise to a phrase to simply nothing. You forget about it and it ceases to exist. Those are the big ones, but honestly, the little memories hurt more.

Maybe they aren't so little. It is a different line, powerful in a different way. I hope you have a great day. See you soon. It'll be okay. Let's both stay strong. You felt that way once, so much so that you were inclined to tell them. You don't remember anymore though. Seemingly innocuous, but somehow after the fact, beyond poignant. They seemed little at the time. In this moment they feel much more devastating, even though you don't want them to. You drag your eyes across the lines again and again and you pretend it means nothing and you tell yourself to forget about it, but it takes a lot of effort. Effort you may not always have. Your entire essence has chosen to forget, and you agree with it. A particle of you is dormant in your mind. On the tip of your thoughts, but never being actualized by words or recognition. Never given life. But it takes a life of its own, and you leave the memory for another moment, to ferment and stew and to be forgotten again and found again, later, when time has made a fool of you, as it makes fools of us all.

Sometimes you share a memory. They have a secret of yours. You gave it to them to keep, but now you hope they forget it, too. Vulnerability changes your mind swiftly. To go from lusting after those lost memories, to know every fragment of your psyche across time, to wishing that forgetfulness upon her. Your mind is spinning you in circles. Don't do that. Don't be so... evil. You think you're better than that, huh? You thought so. But you're not in control of your thoughts. And look where they took you. You heinous beast.

It goes this way, back and forth, for a long time. So long that you forget what the feelings behind these thoughts even mean. When loathing and loving interchange with haste, they start to feel the same. Back at square one. So you roll over and at some point in the tumultuous little maelstrom rattling around in your skull you loll off to sleep, mid-thought, mid-idea, middling.

Goodnight.

It's funny to me, you think, completely internally, how a night of rest changes your outlook. Last night you were eager to reconnect, and now, in the morning, you're complacent. What changed in the night? Which you is the one you want to be? The guttural, feverish oaf of yesterday or the careless, logical automaton of a new day? So what DID change? You shake it out of your head, literally and figuratively. You don't like questions without any answers, so you're lucky you're not that keen on closure really. Some things are better left up in the air.

Later, as the veil of night takes you into it's thrall, you hearken back to these old memories, the ones you can't remember.

They aren't memories anymore, so what are they? A fragment of your past, lost to even you. Your memory has holes and gaps and jumps. A natural bridge being made a set of islands by the tide. Nothing lasts forever against that tide, and apparently many things don't last beyond immediacy. Recency and forefront reign supreme, but here I come, combative to a fault, tirelessly hopeful, the unfettered beast of optimism, regained sovereignty.

I won't let my stupid brain win. A wisp of uncertainty encompasses my thoughts, but I will not allow it to eclipse my being. A sliver of doubt could turn to waves of anguish, but I know that. What is guilt, anguish, pain if not self-inflicted cognitively. After a brief flailing I reassume control.

This is the way it must be. For who is really master of their own domain? If not the man who can realize a truth or mistruth and disobey it? If not for the man who realizes he is a slave to his perception and alters it? If not the man who is powerfully ignorant of his own neuroses? If not the man who replaces his bleakness with hubris of his own volition? If not the man who is reminded of lost love and chooses to love again. If not the man who continues, smiling, bright eyed, in the face of everlasting disconsolation.