Forgetting

It's not easy to forget. I'd say the first step is to close off every door that makes the past accessible to you. It's easy to want to turn back because it's familiar and comfortable - how much harm is a phone call or a message every now and then going to cause? You cared a lot about this person before, so why would it need to change now? How much harm is a simple seashell sitting on your windowsill going to cause?

A lot.

You might come home one day after a long day at work, stressed out and tired, after having missed a bus and fallen asleep on the second one, coming home hours after you were supposed to come home, and having a lot on your mind. You're worried about writing a standardized test and your daily scores maybe aren't as high as you'd like them to be. You need to figure out groceries, utilities, and rent money. You need to study, eat, sleep, and get up for work tomorrow.

But you can't even get beyond the fact that suddenly everything in your room is a blatantly obvious reminder of the year you just went through. You can remember this person looking at your wall and wanting to tear down all of the posters and pictures you had that were covering the entire wall. You can remember this person walking through your room and moving your things around while you weren't looking. You can remember this person sitting on your chair and discussing the future with you.

You sort of feel like you have nowhere to run to and hide because you let this person into your hiding place - the place where you could sit in your PJs and play your guitar, the one place where you could feel small, or feel like the king of a castle, and take off your mask and rest your outdoor voice - the one safe space that usually isn't privy to a lot of people because not a lot of people see your room with the door closed - the X-Men poster plastered on the back of the door is your own little secret; the glow-in-the-dark stars on your ceiling that you put up by jumping up and down on your bed and hammering away at your ceiling with a plastic coat hanger can't be seen unless the lights are off. But you let them in.

So you change into your at-home clothes and start packing away all of the stuffed animals, the cards, the letters, the postcards, the event posters, the event programs, the flowers, and that seashell - you put it into a bag and stuff it into your closet. Then you tear down all of the pictures and posters on your wall and stuff those into your closet too. Lastly, you rearrange all of the furniture in your room so nothing looks the same anymore.

When you finish, it's nearly time to sleep, but you just feel better - like you've already forgotten.