What is the point of forgetting? In a lifetime, a person has countless experiences; naturally, not all of them can be remembered. What distinguishes one thought from another in becoming a memory? And at what point does this thought leave the mind, never to be pondered again by anyone?

Certainly, if humankind is a totally natural and organic creature there would not be such a thing as selective memory (I use selective memory here for lack of a better term; truly, what I mean is that one can remember events of many years ago but not an event from a few days ago). There must be some touch of the divine upon the minds of men, some spark that is not manifest in other creatures, that not only distinguishes the mental processes of mankind but also its social behaviors.

So, what makes a person forget? Certainly not willpower, for the more one wills a concept away, the more powerfully it envelops the mind. Disuse seems the most probable answer; if one leaves a memory fallow in the mind it will simply sit and fade away. However, it is more than likely that there will be a trigger at some point in the future to fertilize this thought that has grown more fertile and more intense in its very essence, so that its return will be more powerful than the memory itself and it will engulf the mind endlessly.

The memories that plague my mind are paradoxical. As much as I want to forget them, I want to hold onto them, frame them upon a wall for all to see. The tragic beauty of lost love is a concept so glorified within human society; even love itself is one of those uniquely divine attributes of humankind that cannot be found in other creatures. Lost love, whether one attempts to will it away or just leaves it alone, will remain. It is different than the other grievings of a person in that it stays forever in the mind, perhaps not always on the forefront of thought, but always there and just a split-second's reminiscing away.

The concept of nostalgia, of which I have previously expounded upon, is a powerful one. When one misses a lover nostalgically, the unique experiences of that love are stripped away, so that all that remains is the classical ideal of love.

In my life, I think the fact that I believe so fervently in the classical concept of love is because I've had it so seldomly...Vincent gave it to me for such a brief period of my life, and then it was gone. Prior to that, I thought I had known what love was, but with that, I discovered its true meaning. And because I had it for so short a time, and because I so nostalgically miss it, the passion and fervor with which I consider it is one of the most powerful driving forces in my day-to-day life.

I believe that all people who have ever loved feel the way that I do about love, but that only poets and artists have the ability to express the emotion--in colors, words, lines, shapes, rhymes, or whatever medium the creator feels most exemplifies the emotion.

And we all want to forget this nostalgia. We all want to leave it behind. But at the same time, we don't want to move on at all. Moving past one's heartbreak means that it is accepted, but allowing it to loom over one's life means that there is some despondent hope that things can be the way that they were, and that there's still a chance for love with the lover who still holds the heart in a steel bind. That is why love so consumes the mind--because we won't accept it as just a memory, to fade away into the past, or to forget it. If love does become a memory, it becomes vulnerable to the forces of forgetting, and so we always hold it in the forefront of our mind in some feeble attempt to believe that it continues to exist between oneself and the lover.

So I am unable (or perhaps just unwilling) to forget this love. And as more time passes, this hope becomes ever more desperate for legitimacy, and it becomes a draconian scourge upon my mind. That is why I feel I have "relapsed" into heartbreak; as time goes by, the fact that this lost love is not realized deepens the piercing strength with which Vincent steadfastly holds my heart.

I cannot forget. I must hold on.