memories

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I’ve been doing a lot of remembering lately.

This time last year, I was with J and couldn’t have dreamed that a relationship could be so fulfilling, make me so intensely happy. I live in this past in my memories with the knowledge that the end is also near. We broke up in a week’s time, last year. The happiness I remember in my memory is tainted with the knowing that heartbreak is just around the corner, that that happiness won’t last. The last month I’ve been remembering, living in a tension of then and now, then and now.

It makes me wonder if I would want to know the future, or if that would just ruin the present. I think that I would opt for ignorance. I don’t think we would ever start anything if we knew that it would end, the heartbreak that would ensue.

The sad reality is that everything will eventually end, but we have to live as if it won’t. We all live with a blindness that makes our existence more comfortable.

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I’ve been writing an essay on Wordsworth and the role of memories. My thesis statement is around how our memories heighten all our senses and we experience that moment in time so much more vividly and romantically in our mind than it actually is in reality.

In thinking about seeing J yesterday, I feel that thesis resonate. He looked dull- so ordinary, so.. beige. My memory made him out to be this incredibly shiny person. He’s not. He’s an ordinary human being. There is a level of liberation in realising that.

Thank you Wordsworth.

Eight

Today, I’m writing this from a cafe on the pier. J and I walked this pier on our second date where we joked about stealing life rings from the boats for a dress up party my flat was having. It was overcast that day, like today is, and I can’t stop my mind from going back and reliving the happiness and excitement that I felt from being with him.

There’s a thin line between love and hate. I hate that there’s so much in this city that reminds me of him but at the same time, I love those memories we built here.

I’ve been trying to implement the strategies my counsellor suggested, thinking of those memories objectively and prying them apart to separate the things that I miss, from him. So instead of thinking right now that I miss him and those times, instead thinking that I miss dating and the excitement of new relationships, and of the discovery of someone new.

But it’s so much easier said than done.

I just want to sit and reminisce on those times, feel that happiness again, even if it’s only in my mind. That is my default and it’s so much more effort to push myself to curb my thoughts into healthier patterns. I know that it’s necessary though, and I have to remind myself of the truth that one day it won’t feel like this anymore, even if I don’t believe it right now.