If you’ve ever seen Eternal Sunshine for the Spotless Mind, you know that this movie really hits you right where it hurts. When you find the one you thought you would be with forever, but then something happens, and it’s all over. You try to move on and can’t, but then you find a solution.
You take everything that reminds you of them, and then someone wipes your memories of that person completely, and that’s when you think you’re free. You think that the pain is gone and you can heal, but forgetting what happened, forgetting that person, isn’t the same as healing from the pain it caused.
This movie makes us realize that forgetting anything isn’t healing. You can simply forget something that was traumatic to you, doesn’t mean that it didn’t happen, doesn’t mean that you just got over what happened. I’ve gone through so much over the years, probably kept things hidden in the back of my mind, trying to forget. Loss and trauma are all things that can’t just be forgotten.
The world is a hard place, and forgetting could make it easier, but it’s like medicine: it doesn’t heal; it’s a band-aid that makes it go away for just a little while, and when you least expect it, it comes back and reminds you of the pain all over again. Loss, losing someone you love, even if it’s a pet, is one of the hardest things to endure. Breakups are hard too; even if it’s mutual, it can be its own kind of pain.
I’ve lost many animals in my lifetime, cats mostly, that I’ve bonded with and had a deep attachment to, and the days that I forget that it happened, I wake up the next day remembering that they are gone. In the end I would never want to just delete memories of painful memories because they make who someone is as a person. Surviving pain is the first step of healing from it, not forgetting.
