On Forgetting

It has been a little more than a month since I finished my Bachelors and I don’t think that that fact has registered in my brain yet. It seems like it is still some cold, obscure idea, not a past occurrence I have lived through, as if it were the picture of an old neighbour whose house I would walk on my knees to as a baby, but now the only proof of them having been a part of my life are the facts of their existence presented to me by my parents. The last month of my degree feels like the tiny beads of kaali mirch my mom makes me place under my tongue when I have a cough, their wrinkly cover and slight spiciness sitting uneasily in my mouth, threatening to burst and burn it if hampered with. No matter how much I want to, my heart finds itself incapable of dwelling on how it got here, awaiting the start of a new degree at a new college, having to leave behind all that felt like home for the past couple of years. Like Eliot’s Prufrock, I, too, have measured my life out in coffee spoons, regimenting my time and thoughts, preventing me from securing the flotsam of memories drifting untethered in my head.

A lot is changing. After almost three years, I am leaving behind a place that showed me colours of life I had never imagined I would see. It has given me people whose memories will always carry with themselves the hurt and longing that comes with not having them close. It gave me two of my closest friends, friends who opened up their teetering home to me when I was faltering badly with being an adult. It wasn’t as if they had it all figured out, but that was the beauty of it, the mayhem of being a grown up quietened on those evenings when we were together, studying, talking or making dinner, with our cat, Dobby, smelling everything in his reach and us bickering over who will wash the dishes. It gave me the friend who loves One Direction and whose hugs soften the edge of the world for a few moments; the friend who took me to Manju ka Tilla for the first time and is now a permanent companion for all future visits; the friend who always asks me if I ate and brings me the lunches her Nani makes because the canteen food is too spicy; the friend who draws beautiful eyes on benches during boring lectures and tells me elaborate stories about how she ended up choosing the earrings she is wearing; the friend who gifted me polaroids with songs on my birthday and taught me that I need to stop being so quick to judge people; the friend who became my roommate of two years.

The most frequently visited website on my internet browser for the past few weeks has been the DMRC website answering my insistent queries about which metro line will take me to my friends who are now scattered across the city. Each new route I learn about becomes a pneumatic tube in my brain, carrying me from a place that I know of only from a couple of rushed visits, to people who have defined comfort for me for the past couple of years. As I bade good bye to these people, and as I left behind the flat where we marked Dobby’s height as he scratched our arms for waking him, all those half-imagined scenarios of teary goodbyes I had abandoned in thought became all too real and I came face-to-face with the intensity of the pain memories hide in their wombs. I am trying desperately to fight against rememberance because I do not want that which I already have to be overwritten by that which is about to come. I am hostile to memories because I can’t keep reliving them. It is almost as if I have imagined myself to be Orpheus, bringing his beloved Eurydice back from the underworld, and just as he was beseeched to not look back, I have assumed that looking back at my memories will destroy all that is good about them with the ache of the yearning they carry.

These memories of mine, so far, have not been able to combat change. Every good memory I make in the present takes me back to the one that I already have, as if the old memory were a rock I threw into the lake of the new one, causing ripples of nostalgia and longing reverberate through it. And since these ripples of the past hurt too much to remember, I forget, turning life into an eternal present concerned only with moving forward. I transform into a faulty locomotive with broken brakes, running too fast and forgetting all that I passed on the way. In some cases, I am grateful for that forgetfulness, letting the wraith of unwanted memories haunt a graveyard I hope never to visit. But, in the other cases, the pain comes because the good memories yearn to be remembered and this yearning carries with itself the reminder that I am not living in those good memories anymore, and in trying to shun the pain, the sweetness of the memory also gets blotted out. The sorrow of letting go eats up the joy that makes the past so hard to let go in the first place.

It is not easy to forget, but once you start doing it, every time seems to get a little easier, and before you know it, all you are left with is a destination as the only proof of your journey, which feels as hollow as it rings in the ear. The melancholy of missing might be heavy and lonely, but having nothing and no one to miss is heavier. Missing someone means you’re alive, it means you’ve lived enough to crave for your own life, for your own self as it used to be with the people you ache for. Orpheus may have looked back and lost his beloved forever, but, when I look back, I am making sure that I am keeping the people and the places that have made me who I am, who have made these memories I am trying so desperately to not let turn into the past, stay the way they are, away from the superimposition of the present. And as I make space for new beginnings, I don’t want where I have reached to be the only proof of what has passed, I want to look back as I move forward, I want to both create and remember.