Last night, while on a conference call with two friends, my bestest A, mentioned an incident that occurred during our freshman year of college. All my life, I was a journaler. Everywhere I was, so was my notebook, from the time I was 12 to 18. I wrote down information about boys I liked, boys I dated, and chronicled my first serious relationship. It was when that relationship went down the drain (you never really forget the first time you walk in on a significant other in bed with another person), that I went home for a weekend, on a rampage, and shredded every journal from my adolescence. At first I started putting page after page, then pages after pages through my parents' shredder. Finally, when I broke the shredder after trying to push through too many pages of my scrawled writing, I sat in my room and started tearing up the remaining journals by hand. I considered it a purging of all my memories with boys from the previous few years. A walked into my room, take-out dinner in hand, to find me amidst hundreds and hundreds of torn pages.
Somehow, I thought tearing all of those pages to bits would let me forget. More importantly, I thought forgetting would allow me to not hurt anymore. Out of sight, out of mind. A few years later, after a particularly nasty breakup, I went through and detagged every photo of us on Facebook. As if pushing the black and white image of us smiling and laughing would make the hurt go away. A year later, still not completely letting the relationship die due to mistakes on both of our parts, I continued to delete every Facebook message from him. I still thought the further I can push the memories away, the easier it would be to forget.
2009, 23 years old, and I've come to realize that no one ever forgets (didn't I just say above how I'd never forget the image of a boyfriend in bed with someone else?). Hurt still hurts and feelings just might never go away. Maybe it's a grown up way to look at the demise of relationships; far away from the idea that one day you will wake up and feel okay again because you just erased the person from your life -- in written, electronic and communicative form. While discussing this with P, she brought up the very valid point that regardless of the state of the union of each other now, there was once a point where an ex-couple made each other happy. Very happy, most likely. Isn't it a bit unfair to simply forget, erase, delete to trash and not acknowledge each other?
-M
