Amnesia

               To forgive and forget. They always talk about the forgiving part. They never

talk about the forgetting part. Maybe it’s because it’s almost impossible with our

minds: you can’t make yourself forget something. It happens with time, not with work.

That’s why I hate it.

               Even worse, forgetting something leaves you with nothing but emptiness. You

remembered something happened. You remember you had something. But you can’t remember

what it was. It’s like forgetting a dream.

               You can’t grasp at any of the detail or any of the significance, but it leaves

you with an unexplainable, pervasive feeling of fear. Not the type of fear that makes

you jump out of your seat, but the dark, hidden fear that seeps through the fog of

your mind. The unexplainable fear that keeps you up at night.

               But sometimes that fear and that feeling of emptiness is better than what the

memory made you feel in the first place. At least fear and emptiness don’t carry as

much of a weight. Sadness, anger, jealousy: they’re deeply rooted. They entangle your

thoughts. The emptiness is there when nothing else is there to take over. It’s almost

relieving.

               Sometimes the forgetting is better than the remembering.

               It’s like how sometimes I wish I could stop repeating every little detail of

that day. Every little line in your eye, that one slight imperfection that you have in

your right iris that I’ve stared at for years but I never thought to ask about, the

way that your vision turned glossy and blurry once you blinked, the way your makeup

stained your cheeks, the way our breaths made smoke in the cold air, that way that you

palmed the broken chain of the necklace, and the way that you spoke every slow word

that you left me with.

               I wish I could forget all of it. But forgetting all of that would require

forgetting you. Forgetting the good parts; the feeling of our hands holding, the

feeling of my hands around your waist, the sound of your laugh, the brightness of your

smile, the sound of your gentle voice.

               Once I forget you, I can’t get you back. That’s the worst part. Or maybe the

worst part is knowing that there are a million things I would do to ask you about how

you got that little imperfection, but there are a million more that I would do so that

I could forget that it ever existed.