God, I'm torn apart inside.

Though it's been a while now
I can still feel so much pain
Like a knife that cuts you the wound heals
but that scar, that scar remains

and now I see you found somebody new
and I never meant that much to you
And to know that tears me up inside
And to see you cuts me like a knife

This is why I pretended not to see you.

We were tumultuous; we were the happiest accident that ever was made. Yet, that was it. We never matured, we never progressed, and if love is kindness, all we had to offer was chaos. All along, we made up one another in our minds, in our wildest dreams. In reality, we never wanted one another at our worst, but didn’t it hurt worse when we didn’t want each other even at our best? It could not have been more of a stereotypical mess. We wore ourselves out wearing each other in, and we yielded the same catastrophic results day in and day out. Isn’t insanity defined as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results?
Well, as it turns out, I do not want to be insane any longer.

This is how moving on looks like..

Moving on is not like a birthday, you can’t count down the hours ‘til it arrives and you can’t mark it on a calendar and you can’t call up your friends to help you celebrate. You can’t plan for it and you can’t conclude it by blowing out a candle. When moving on happens there will be no announcements, no notifications, no congratulations. There will be no parade; only you will know. Moving on is like aging that way, if aging happened backward. If the passing of days made you new and young, if your condition only had room to improve. Instead of a throbbing pain in your right knee forcefully, increasingly making its presence known, first with a whisper and then with a mumble and then with a shout, ‘til you can’t move, ‘til you can’t walk; moving on is gradual like that except when it’s over, you can walk just fine. You can run, even.

Moving on is like this: one day you forget the taste. The next, you forget the smell. Then the touch. Then the laugh. Then the smile. Then the jokes. Then the eyes, the hair, the hands, the feet. You forget the pulses, the beats, the rhythms and how you sometimes felt like they all belonged to you. You forget the words; finally, you forget the voice that spoke them. Moving on is like one day, you’re walking or reading or drinking the sun and one of those footprints, one of those artifacts will creep into your consciousness, “already seen,” the French call this, déjà vu, and you won’t know where it belongs or how it got there. All it takes is a familiar laugh, a recognizable word and you are transported to who knows where. You are a confused paleontologist now, scrambling to make sense of things left behind, trying to reunite the right dinosaur with the right bones. The scar from his burst appendix goes here, the part of his leg that doesn’t grow hair belongs there, I think this is his morning breath but maybe it belongs to someone who came before him; some other ghost, some other relic. His taste is an aftertaste now, his crow’s feet a souvenir with no place to call home. That’s what moving on is like.

Moving on is not like beginning a new chapter, it’s like beginning a new book — with each turned page, the last story you read fades into the background. A fairy tale that becomes just another book on a shelf; folded corners and underlined words the only reminder of how you used to touch and hold and love it. Moving on is when you begin to forget the intricacies of a character you knew intimately, you forget what he did for a living and the way he prepared grilled cheese and the nickname he had for his first girlfriend. You forget how he lost his virginity, you forget his middle name.

Moving on is waking up without a sour feeling in your stomach, looking at a familiar menu and ordering something different, taking the direct route to a destination and not the one that crosses a path you once set in stone. Moving on is when you think about him and don’t punish yourself for it, when he begins to evoke more of a scientific response than an emotional one, like “This is a 6’0” blonde-haired person who exists,” and not “This is a person I wish I’d never met; this is a person who has made me less of one.” Moving on is not to destroy or to combust or to set ablaze, it is simply to move, to advance through space and time, to leave behind the familiar dull of heartbreak for the new, the unknown, the strange. Moving on is a bird flying south for the winter who decides maybe the warmth isn’t so bad, who decides maybe it’ll stay there for awhile; moving on is like freedom, is what moving on is like.

I will forget you.

I will forget you and if that doesn’t sound romantic, it’s because it isn’t. It’s a simple inevitability, a truth colder than the last night we spent together. Remember that night? Gosh! What year was that? When I woke up in the morning and felt nothing familiar, that’s when I knew it was over for good. At least, that’s what I think happened. I fill in the blanks sometimes because I’ve already begun to forget.

I remember the color of your hair, but not the color of your laugh. I remember your name, that one’s easy; I don’t remember how your parents say it in their native tongue (I forgot that one the second you told me). I remember that you exist, that we spent some of our time together for what now feels like a blip, a sneeze, a little nothing. But I forget everything else, like what brought us together and what drove us apart. And mostly everything that happened in between that.

I forget what it’s like to kiss you and what it’s like to want to. I forget what it feels like to hold your hand, to be wrap inside your arms. I forget what it’s like to trust you, to believe in you, to need you. I forget what it’s like to think that I’d never forget any of it. For a long time, I thought I never would. You and I both know you left ghosts behind, but they seem to have found someone new to haunt. Maybe it’s you.

The inside jokes have already dissolved into unordered words with no punchline. The gifts have been reduced to objects whose saving grace is their monetary value, no meaning and all function. There are photographs, somewhere, but I’m not the person posed in them anymore and whoever that is sitting next to me, all dressed up in your costume and wearing your mask, well, that’s not you either. But what do I know about who you are? I forget that part, if I ever knew it to begin with.

I won’t forget you the way I won’t forget the pain of getting a wisdom tooth removed. Like something that happened to me once and then unhappened to me and then didn’t matter anymore.

But I will forget you where it counts, like in the eyes and in the mornings and in the moments that felt and looked and tasted a lot like love. I will forget you in those places because I already have.

Distance has so little to do with forgetting.

 

DANCE OF LIFE by Joe D' Mango

There were two hearts that met in a dance.  That moment was magical.  There was a sweet song playing, there was harmony…and soon…love in the air.  They fell in love and started building castles with their dreams and promised forever with all certainty.  But, somewhere, in the midst of the fun, they got lost in the dance, something went wrong, but they can never do anything.  They were just drifting away, their fortress falling apart.  There were so many questions…but no one had an answer.

Then the music stopped…and there was silence…

 When we truly loved someone, we give our best and let that person see the pureness of our intention.  But sometimes, that person makes us cry and hurts us for the wrong reason.  That someone must have loved us, but he has not loved us enough to make him stand for what he truly felt.

Now, we are faced with the seemingly impossible task of forgetting.  We have burdened ourselves long enough, but we still can’t get out of this emotional trap.  Let us remember that the more we try to forget someone we love…the more painful letting go will become…

Sometimes, we never had to take that person out of our hearts at all…for he will always be there…no matter how we drive him away…It isn’t his presence that make this difficult.  It is our stubbornness to accept our destiny that aligns forgetting next to impossible.  We keep a cold face but deep in our hearts, there is still that lingering hope for reconciliation.  Somehow, we still believe that we can rekindle small embers and relight the fire that once burned in our hearts.  These thoughts give us hope… but also breed the seeds of loneliness and despair.

The only way to forget is to accept…and the only way to move on is to look ahead…and let the footprints of the past…be blown by the wind of time…only then can our hearts find a partner in the dance of life…and hopefully…never get lost again…