Forgetting
by Christine Shultz
It’s lucky that we don’t remember things for long.
The pain that throbs through your arm, red-hot and screaming, when you flip your bike and tear all the skin off … it’s gone the next day. The pain ebbs away as your body heals, and a while later you can’t even remember how it felt at first.
The same goes for other kinds of pain, the ones that draw tears instead of blood. Seeing a kid starving to death hurts, almost physically, but only till the next morning, or maybe even the next television show. By then we’ve forgotten the kid exists.
Even when the pain is our own — a broken heart, a best friend dead, a stillborn child — it doesn’t last. Time passes, and eventually we look back on the pain as something … not quite alien, but not ours anymore. We’re looking in from outside. And eventually, most of the time, we can forget all about it.
That’s the way our minds work, and it sounds callous and terrible, but it’s not. It’s a good thing. We can handle pain in small doses, but the whole ocean of hurt that swirls around us daily would drown us if it came all at once.
I can remember pain when I try.
Sometimes I remember Brian, a boy in Edinburgh who’s on the streets at 16, the same age as my little brother, and probably going to serve his first prison sentence about the time my baby brother gets his diploma, and I think about what Brian’s life would’ve been like if someone had been there — someone like my mom — to love him and teach him right when he’d been little.
The pain comes back then, almost as real and awful as it was a year ago when I sat inside a night shelter listening to the boy bang on the door, begging us to let him back in, even though he’d threatened someone with a knife the night before. I knew I couldn’t let him in. All I could do then, and now, was pray for him and cry till the sharp ache in my heart dulled.
I can remember that kind of pain, but only when I try. Most of the time I forget. We all do; we have to. If we didn’t, we’d run out of tears and either go crazy, or kill ourselves, or turn numb inside. I’m glad we can forget. I’m glad I can forget.
