How can you forget love? How can you forget someone you’ve loved? I think I can understand how you could forget someone with whom you’ve shared a brief moment, a passing fancy, a wink, maybe even a dalliance—daydreamed or real, but forgetting someone you’ve loved?
How can you forget someone you’ve trusted completely, someone from whom you’ve withheld no intimacy, someone to whom you have made yourself totally vulnerable? How can you forget someone for whom your habit of supporting, encouraging, and forgiving is so much a part of you that you find yourself—inexplicably and foolishly--forgiving them of the deepest, most fundamental, and shocking betrayal even as they are in the act of that betrayal.
Perhaps my life experience is just too limited, or I have some deeply ingrained and unrealistic concept of love, but forgetting love is outside my personal experience.
Of course such an absolute view of love also creates its own problem. One who holds this view, thinking they love and who later comes to believe they don’t love, rather than doubt the longevity of love or admit to an inconstant character may doubt the validity of their earlier feelings. The words expressing this doubt come out as nonsense.
For someone to say, “I don’t love you anymore. I’m not sure I ever did,” is for them to emit a collection of nearly random sounds, apparently intended to be words, but that do not make meaning. I’ve read these words so many places, heard about them as a relationship exit line so many times that I think they simply must be on someone’s top ten list of trite relationship phrases. There’s as much meaning in the phrases, “I don’t think my heart beats anymore, I’m not sure it ever has,” or “I don’t think I breathe oxygen anymore, I’m not sure I ever did.”
This of course is ephemeral nonsense. Love is the eternal verity here. Moreover, as inexplicably foolish as it seems, the very essence of eternal love includes forgiving even those who betray and reject in the very act of betrayal and rejection.
2 comments:
Perhaps few choose to uphold the idealistic concept of love because it hurts so much to love in this manner. To begin with, few people have the emotional capacity to feel love in this way. One who is privy to this form of love will inevitably strive to achieve it and inevitably experience the pain that results from such love. Then there will come a point when he will choose to live life rather than allow himself to become suffocated by painful emotions. As a result, ultimately, even he who believes in idealistic, unconditional love chooses to run from it and speak words that string together no meaning. Perhaps in order to walk this earth successfully we all have to become a bit numb.
Perhaps I've given up on walking this earth successfully. I've chosen a fool's path because I don't want to become numb. I've been hurt before, even before Connie. I will certainly be hurt again. I would hate to be unable to feel the joy of love because I've become a bit numb to pain.
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