Remembering to Forget

When someone you love leaves you, it leaves an emptiness inside of you that you can't escape. You go for coffee with friends, watch movie after movie, go for walk after walk, and talk for hours on the phone with any friend that you can if it means that for all of those moments you don't have to think about the fact that they actually left you. Every one of those moments is designed to be filled so that you aren't left with the one very real fact that they just don't love you anymore. But once those moments alone begin to grow again, the realness sets in and you have to think about it. Accept it. Remember it or in my case try to forget it. The hardest part is knowing what ratio of forgetting and remembering you choose.

It is a very delicate balance. If you try too hard to forget than you risk not remembering all of the really special moments you shared with that person. You block out all of the memories so you just don't have to think about it and a year later, you can't remember the time he picked you a single yellow marigold at 1 o'clock in the morning for your 6 month anniversary which seems like a very small gesture, but in that moment it meant the world to you. You forget the feeling of holding him close in a foreign city park while he lamented the loss of a loved one. You forget the notes he left you in the sandwiches he made you and how good it felt to rip a hardball across the park to him. You forget watching movies in bed, or how he liked his coffee, or how mad he'd get when you forgot to wait for him to open the car door for you. You'd forget Fenway Park, and playing cards while talking sports, and the roadtrips, the baseball games, the free $38 martini you got because the restaurant forgot to seat you. All these things could just disappear. They could be gone without you realizing. And that almost makes me more sad than the fact that he's gone.

I don't want to forget, but I want to move on and instead of forcing the memories away I will embrace them bit by bit. I won't do what I always do and find some way to push everything about that person away, and try my hardest to forget them only to find that I still miss them but I have nothing to miss them with. I really want to hold him in my heart, so that hole isn't so empty and I'm not denying what was such a wonderful and special part of my life. So that is that, I will remember in hopes that someday I will not miss you in the way I do now. In hopes that sometime soon that hole will be full of a new love and a few fond memories of you.