Member-only story
Dear forgetting
A love letter to letting go and living again
You arrived slowly, like a mist creeping across an old meadow, soft and uninvited. At first, I resented you. I had been clinging to fragments of memories, like torn pages of a book I never wanted to finish. I rasped their names to thin them out. I would whisper the tales aloud, not to lose the sound of the voice, nor how the words felt in my throat. Yet you came, gentle but untiring.
Your first task was to gnaw away at the peripheries—faces were rarely recognizable anymore, like photographs left too long in the ultraviolet rays of the sun. Names in exact detail, perfect laughter, painful silences-they all frayed. At first, I would shriek in fear. I thought memories were proof of love. I thought forgetting was betrayal.
Oh, but how terribly mistaken I was.
You nurtured me to realize that forgetting is not erasing; rather, it is evolving. Love does not get wiped away with time: it gets distilled. It loses its sharpness, it gets softer. You took the jaggedness of grief and made it smooth. I do not wake with the sting of absence clawing on my chest anymore. I do not cringe at the sound of a song anymore. I do not resist walking past places anymore. You gave me life again.
