Forgetful Lucy

Someone asked me very recently a question that is almost unanswerable; not because there was a wrong variable in the question, but more because it's just impossible to answer one. The question was this: How do you try to forget someone you like?

It's not as hard as answering to the questions such as how to stop the war in Gaza, or how to cure AIDS  or something like that. And it's also not something that scientists and professors tirelessly working in the lab or discussing with their fellows to solve. It's just something that perhaps, they too, have problems with.

Well, what was my answer to that question? I don't know. I'm not really in the capacity to answer that question as if I'm an expert. Truthfully, I don't think I ever chose 'forgetting' as my coping mechanism, so I don't know what it takes for one to forget someone they've been romantically linked to.

But maybe, well, just maybe. We don't. We don't try to forget. Trying to forget would only means remembering even more, doesn't it? And that's not really what we're aiming for. I think forgetting would happen the same way moving on does. They just happen. You had to undergo some really rough journey, feeling tortured each day you wake up, knowing that that person still owns a (special) place in your heart. And you wonder why. Why you had to have feelings for them. Why not everyone can have the luxury to have that on-and-off buttons in their hearts. Or why don't the freaking genius scientists work on a forgetting pills so that people don't have to go through the misery of trying to forget about someone. But then one day, without you even realizing, you have gone the whole week without thinking about them, be it because you're busy or just because you forgot. Yay!

The Great Audrey Hepburn once said that happiness is a short-term memory. That might be true. But even if you were born with this amazingly long-term memory, it doesn't mean you can't forget. Once, you had a childhood amnesia, which resulted in you not remembering the first two or three years in your life. Hear me out. You don't have to forget. Sometimes, to stop thinking or feeling, or whatever it is about something of someone, you don't have to forget. Sometimes all it takes is the acceptance that, well, you and them can't happen. End of story. You don't forget, you just make peace with that part of yourself. It takes time, sure. But so does everything else, even getting you out of your mother's womb takes time, so wait for it. And in the meanwhile, no matter what happens, no matter how hopeless, keep breathing.