Torment of not remembering

It takes time for the missing to take on their rightful form in our feelings. We try to keep them in our mind. We feel that if we don’t keep them close, their memory loses color, and becomes pale, twinkling in our memories only now and again and hither and thither, in forlorn, abandoned silhouettes, quickly given a nice welcome by our hearts, only to be dismissed by our snobbish brains.

It takes time for the missing to take on their rightful form in our feelings. Those missing ones who hurt us, cut us in a place that took long to heal, offended our dignities and upset our obliging and foolish hearts – what a difference it is between when they first leave you and much later on when you remember them.

It takes time for the missing to take on their rightful form in our feelings. When they first leave you you are in turmoil of naive fright and panic, as though some sort of internal combustion has abruptly burned your heart into ashes, in an instant you have no heart, only ashes caged where your heart used to be.
After some time passes, when you have accidentally moved on, then you remember them, and you start to wonder why exactly you were frantic to be with them? What was so special about them? And if it was meant to be, wouldn’t it have lasted?

You can either breathe life into your wounded, cut, offended, and foolish hearts, and start living more powerfully, laughing harder, allowing sensations to overcome you, becoming more devoted and more loving, and sucking power from the knowledge that since you’ve already been through what you’ve been through, since you’ve already experienced the pain, you can take it all – you’re stronger.

Or , after being damaged and deserted, you can nurture a firmer, more solid, and more inflexible heart – so concrete that no love can enter it and swallow it whole. You can become guarded and discouraged. You lock yourself in a top-security prison. Your distorted heart leaks life out from a very tiny and almost invisible crack in the concrete. Yet you continue locking it away in a friendless, wasteful grief. You don’t even allow the cut to heal before your cast it. You are in such a hurry to close the bloody cut that you seal it before the skin grows back properly. You seal your heart in such a hard cast that the skin grows back under the cast flawed and spoiled, yet you put your flawed and spoiled heart in an official place, sitting ceremoniously, not allowing anyone close. And it chants about what might have been, what might have been…what might have been.

It takes time for the missing to take on their rightful form in our feelings. For me, I forget. I really do forget. It took me some time to train myself to forget, but I think I’ve figured it out: that second…no, that millisecond you just spent thinking about someone who’s hurt you…remembering some painful memory…you can never get it back. It’s gone, you’ve lost it. Are they really so amazing that their memory has stolen a second from your life? Something that you can never get back?

But the downside to forgetting is, when someone reminds you of them, tells you something about them that you never expected, when you hear in your ears how they’ve moved on, the feeling of remembrance is – I think – a bit more intense than if you had been constantly thinking about that person. Yet somehow, that small shameful, shy smile shows up on your lips, and you feel pity: like you are someone else looking down at yourself and saying, tsk tsk tsk, if only you knew what was in store for you...and who is waiting for you in your future...And then you tell yourself that it’s ok, it’s a little too late to care anyway, and you go on with whatever you were doing. You might feel a little sad, but then you remember what you have, you become grateful for what you have in this moment, in your life, and you try to live mad – talking madly, living madly, desiring madly, never yawning or saying something boring, but burning like an exploding yellow roman candle.
But it still takes time for the missing to take on their rightful form in our feelings.