Cleaning Out the Inbox, or Nepenthe
There is something to be said for the art of forgetting.
Time does not heal all wounds so much as it accustoms us to their aching. Time sands down the edges that pricked us, shifting them just out of focus: we are nearsighted creatures. The past never needs to move as far as we think it does to elude us. It takes so little to make us forget. Maybe we are looking for distractions.
Going through old correspondence reminds us of what we have lost. Well, it reminded me, anyway. Part of me wants to do the mature thing, appreciate what we had while we had it, and accept that nothing lasts forever. But part of me is mourning afresh. The wounds have not healed; they were just heaped with debris.
Now that I have rediscovered this warmth, I would not forget it for anything — not for surcease of sorrow, not for new loves. I would not give up these memories for anything — but I cannot help wanting what was.
Good friends are so rare. And as I get older it becomes harder and harder to love.
Recollection
Flipping through her scrapbooks and albums, I am shocked to see us smiling so much. It must have been another lifetime. Other people. I cannot imagine that there was a time when we smiled so much and so easily. Laughter was as comfortable and habitual as the furniture, a fixture we settled into without a second thought.
I am not exaggerating. I am not idealizing a time so longed for it has been forgotten. Our grief occurred in proportion to our joy then. For every crushing defeat there was another moment of impossible levity. The one sounded the depths of the other. They were inextricable — I would not have my roses without thorns — but balanced.
And now, suddenly, we smile less and less often, even just with each other — my best friend, the sister I never had — those smiles seem mustered and wistful. We are smiling to remind each other how to smile. We are smiling to assuage the realization that a shared past does not ensure a shared future. We are smiling to say goodbye.
Somehow laughter got away from us. But something less than grief — creeping resignation — is assuming its place. As though feeling has become too much, as though nothing can ameliorate this weary acceptance. We smiled wanly, and our paths diverged, and there doesn’t seem to be anything else to say. Just stunned silence, and the memory of shared laughter, withering into something more than grief, and less than goodbye.
