To Forgive & Forget

I don’t know if anyone has ever really forgiven and forgotten after the phrase has been offered as the solution to an argument.

It really is a funny sentiment, One that never really made sense to me.

I also don’t believe that pain and love function along different plains, rather there exists an inflammatory entanglement. Love can feel grander when in comfort of pain,  pain can feel harrowingly consuming when derived from love and experiencing either becomes more jarring when we have come to accept the other.

We learn what we love, how to love, and to share love from people, the stories of people and a familiarity with them. But in the same way that beings have the capacity for this good and joy, we can just as easily hurt and the pain that comes from it is not any more easily erased than love.

If anything the horrible things we experience or see others withstand hold more power over us. The event itself demands more attention, and after the fact, their ramifications linger longer.

Whether contemplated or not, after pain there is an effort to escape its reoccurrence,  and learning to behave in such a way that our actions could not inflict that feeling upon others. We can become more aware of its availability, suspicious of its presence and our interactions against it more informed. We can govern kinder, judge softer.

Good things can bloom from badness.

But when “forgive and forget” comes into play it feels like an effort to erase this opportunity.

In my experience, the best and most notable learnings, the broadest of horrisons arise from correction. and that correction cannot exist without wrong. The sudden realisation that your opinion, your stance, is an amalgamation of your exclusive experience, stake and personal interest in a subject and is not in fact, a fact.

For every conflict, personal or global there is no way of enforcing one universal notion. You will have your judgement and I will have mine, but still another course of events exists. One uninfluenced by emotion, held only in the judgement of time and fact. This series regularly goes unacknowledged and certainly seems never to be accurately recounted by those detailed in its occurrence. and why should we expect it to be so? We have established that we are ruled and behave in accordance to experience. To speak in facts alone, with no interjection of opinion would hold a certain coldness, an unnatural and inhuman inflection to conversation or contemplation.

We are taught from a young age to place value in emotion and feeling, talking of walking in someone else’s shoes, having empathy towards another persons situation. Every story is said to have two translations, there is always more to learn, to know, to understand before judgement.

We discuss these two versions of a truth so often that we forget the third, and the existence of “three sides to every story: my side, your side, and the truth” an objective, factual, truth independent of personal bias.

Sometimes it feels as though people can’t acknowledge hurt they have inflicted without thinking it an attack on them. One truth becomes the entire story, and being wrong or having done wrong seems to hold the impression of hugely negative moral connotations.

Even so, their truth, nor someone else’s or even the third objective truth has the power to make someone else’s a lie. No shared memory is made false by personal retrospection founded in different experiences and emotions. But what we seem to forget is that one persons pain cannot confound or cancel out another’s.

So when forgiveness is demanded, and expected without being earned what value does it offer? What right is there to it besides excusing what has been done wrong?

Forgiveness certainly has its place. Burning bridges at every stream and holding a grudge can become overly strenuous, even senseless when time takes you so far away from the argument, act, lie, insensitivity or judgement which sparked such adamant aversion that you can no longer remember the issue itself. However, Forgiving as a principle and requirement lets perspective go unheard and harm done is left to fester. Rushing to its passivity can entrap unresolved argument and develop into resentment, and there forgiveness doesn’t mean anything beyond a word.

Further than forgiveness. It has always seemed funny to ask someone to just “forget”. As if you can just wipe selections of memory. Phrases said in the heat of the moment. Feelings that someone’s treatment evoked. (and this is coming from a girl with a horrific memory)

You cannot simply forget pain.

You are unable to exile hurt at will.

While forgiving and forgetting may offer the space to further develop our mental catalogues of memory with the people we already love and everything else that we have loved before them, should we not get to experience new loves too, untainted and evolving?

and really, as much as we may be museums of everything we’ve ever loved are we not also shrines to our hurt?

If you followed my eyes, you would see how they wander. Searching every room I walk into, safest from afar across a wall or a crowd with only my squinting stare and goosebump ridden skin.

scrounging for a shape

studying every face for sets of eyes I may never see again but am unable to forget.

It’s the kind of searching that doesn’t take direction, and while you can watch its exhibition I don’t think it’s a display of my love and joy.

There is a safety in my coming up empty handed, and maybe that avoidance and its ease is the goal, but encircling and underlying that comfort there is still disappointment, still pain. Should I have struck treasure, actually found the object of attention and the source of my anxieties at least the effort could take an outcome. There would be a reality to substantiate action, but maybe it’s easier to avoid hurting than the idea of it.

Crossing the room maybe I would’ve talked to them, maybe I wouldn’t have, but besides, I would be aware of what’s there in the same breath that I know what’s not.

god forbid I’m caught off guard.

Test it further. Tell me to let it go, then hook me up to a polygraph and ask me if it still hurts.

I’d say “no”

you’d want me to and we could leave it at that.

but you’d see

the needle would still sputter

the line would keep on jumping

it would swirl and break to the rhythm of my heart, a speeding pulse and aching chest, but I hope you’d read my chart kindly, leave it alone or be willing to deal with the rest.

Put on my headphones and you’ll hear how loud the music plays. drown out the world, Hone in my thoughts, tether contemplation and I know I’m clumsy but don’t let go of the leash.

My mind cannot wander without bumping into memories and I don’t think we are capable of forcing ourselves to forget them nor should we feel obligated to forgive.

Yet an immediate absence of forgiveness doesn’t mean hatred, and remembering isn’t spiteful, to me it’s just leaving space, and carving out time to heal.

and maybe time heals all wounds

but scars cannot do more than fade

So let yourself feel it while it bleeds, fight not to forget and when your skin closes over maybe it won’t hurt as bad.