This Is What It’s Like To Love Someone Who Doesn’t Remember You

I held your hand and I brought you in front of years worth of memories. Hundreds of pictures on the wall, each bearing a moment and an emotion worth remembering. Hoping that somehow, one of these hundreds of pictures will trigger something, anything — anger, sadness, joy, confusion, anxiety, excitement, or perhaps love. Anything. I would settle for anything at this point.

You don’t remember, you don’t recognize… The memories, the emotion, me. Nothing.

But still, I loved you.

I can’t blame you for forgetting. It’s not your fault, I guess. Maybe it’s the concept of falling out of love to blame. Because that’s what happens when you fell out of love, your heart forgets what the mind clearly remembers. I won’t deny it, it’s agonizing. It’s crying yourself to sleep every night feeling like there’s a sharp knife dwelling inside your chest. It’s looking onto each picture seeing the couple in love and the story behind each, knowing that they can’t be real again. It’s knowing that you could have been the one, you could have been that one person I can perhaps spend my entire life with, but you chose to forget.

I would do anything to remember, you would do anything to forget.

Every day, I choose you. I choose to stay. Trying to make you feel the magnitude of the love we had, the same love we shared for years. I brought you to our place, in hope that the sheets will work their magic and make you remember the moments we laugh, we kiss, we embrace. I brought you to our cafe, ordering the usual, hoping that the flavor can remind you the ferocity of our love. I brought you to our parking space, where we used to lay awake in the dead of the night, just staring at the stars, reminding each other that we can be who we want to be. That we can be the sun or the star, the wind or the fire — I brought you there hoping the bricks and the cement could produce some kind of miracle and make you notice the intensity of my desire to make you remember the severity of the love you once had for me.

Every night, I choose you. I choose to stay. Trying to convince myself that the magnitude of the love we had is enough to hold me together for a while, for a little longer perhaps. That the love we shared for years is enough reason to stay with you. I look at our place, anticipating how extreme the pain will be if ever your heart decides to fully forget. I thought of our cafe, and the table near the entrance where we used to sit down for hours, just talking and laughing, assuming the amount of tears my eyes can release when your mind concludes to walk out of my door one sad afternoon.

I thought of our parking space, remembering the thick cement and the night sky, knowing how much painful it will be waking up one day, having your shadow nowhere to be found. How excruciating it will be driving up to this place one day, alone – having the silence scream as loud as it can directly to me, all the conversations we had, all the experiences, ideas, theories we talked about right at this very spot. I close my eyes—praying and hoping, not for you to remember the severity of love you once had for me, not for your heart to remember, but for mine to forget. Mine. To. Forget.

How I hope you had amnesia instead, how I hope all these are memories drawn in vast darkness, how I pray all these emotions cease to exist. Maybe it would be less horrible then. But the thing is, you know who I am. You know what we had. You remember it all perfectly. Sadly, you do and no matter how hard I try, you already chose to forget.

That is why the real prayer at this moment is not for you to remember, not for you to love me again, not for God to do something that would help us save us. Because I realized, saving what we had is like making a person with amnesia remember – exhausting and somehow impossible. The prayer at this point is really for my heart to stop trying, for my heart to stop loving, for my heart to let go, for my heart to move on, for this stubborn heart of mine to forget. Forget everything, nothing, everything.