Forget Me Not
Forget the period of time when you saw it in his eyes that he felt you weren’t good enough for him, anymore.
By 
Jen Glantz
Forget the day you met; that obsessively rainy afternoon where you shared a medium pie at an Italian restaurant on 3rd street. How his fingernails got tangled on the back of your shirt when you went to hug goodbye and in that moment, that very sequential pattern of seconds, you felt the same way you did when you had a crush on someone in middle school; the same gang of butterflies threatening to kick your butt if you didn’t spend every waking moment thinking of him and scribbling his name all over your Lisa Frank notebook.
Forget the night you kissed for the first time. How badly you wanted it to happen and when it finally did, when his hand cupped your chin and his eyes rolled over as if into yours, you wondered why all of your first kisses didn’t feel so exotically pure like this one.
Do me a favor and forget:
The boyfriend calling, the dozen of fresh roses smelling, the awkwardly causal inside joke telling, that filled the in-betweens of your first few months together.
Forget the I’m thinking about you and I can’t stop smiling text messages that arrived at the most random moments, for no reason. How the world around you may have been slowly falling apart: your boss screaming at you for breaking the copy machine, your friends moving out of town for glamorous careers, trying to figure out what to do with your life after the summer ended. But none of that mattered. That world revolved in silence, with him.
Forget:
His ringtone.
His Chinese takeout order.
His love for Western movies.
His fluttering bottom lip the night he went to tell you, for the first time, how much he was in love.
Forget the period of time when you saw it in his eyes that he felt you weren’t good enough for him, anymore. How he’d almost instantly drop from holding your hand, skip out on calling you during the week; talk more than just occasionally about some other girl who fascinated him.
While you’re at it, my dear, forget:
How he told you that your personality bugs him. How he wish you’d just grow up, already.
Forget how you wanted to punch your wall when he told you that he wishes you spoke to him as well as you wrote. That he wants to date the version of you who writes these short stories that make someone hurl over in laughter and in tears, not the other you, the girl who is a rambling mess, reading off a grocery list of non sequiturs before just spitting out a Yeah, I love you too.
Forget when he finally mustered up the pathetic guts to tell you he’s not in love with you, anymore. Forget the motions that followed: throwing your phone into a patch of roses. feeling the lower portion of your stomach turn into gobbledygook and sink all the way down to your pinky toe; the staining of dark blue mascara in a chaotic henna pattern all over the palms of your hands.
Forget the next morning. The pains of waking up, splashing water on your face and scrambling to repeat out loud: anyone who says something like that to you is, and will never be, worth it.
Forget how hard you had to make yourself believe it. 
