[HBBC - 2] Selective Ability

Welcome to The Half-Baked Bloggers Consortium's (HBBC) second post. Meet the members here.

This week's topic is Forgive and forget, chosen by Noor Al Zubaidy. Please take the time to view the members' blogs just as you viewed mine in order to get different perspectives about the same topic.

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I was looking for quotes to begin this article with when I came across this

"To forgive and not to forget is like burying the hatchet with the handle sticking out."

~ Unknown

It is that handle that we tug on in times of despair, when we want to remind someone of the extent of compromise we have done  and how much we have let go of things that were painful to us for their sake. We use that martyr-card because we believe it will color us forgiving in the eyes of the beholder, only doesn't it actually show how we were never really that forgiving at all?! Doesn't it actually seem like we occasionally let things go just to bring them up again and use them against somebody when the time calls for it..?!

Well anyway, to forgive...to TRULY forgive...one must let go. I don't know what comes first to the common person but personally, "forgive and forget" for me is just about letting it go. Extracting the pain from a memory, tearing that piece of the past apart, burning it and dispersing its ashes upon moving waters until nature takes that aching act far far away from sight and mind.

Normally, I don't find it that difficult. Once I found someone extremely unworthy of everything I've ever done for them, I look at them as strangers that I never knew. I actually am able to extract every good, bad and neutral memory out of that individual and look at them as if I've never seen or spoken to them before. I forget their voice, their smile, their laughs and I actually forget entire situations. I lose bulks and bulks of memories related to them until poof, they never existed in my life before. I would explain how I did it if only I knew how.

And if only I knew how, I would will myself into forgiving and forgetting the others. Those who were unworthy yet worthy. The ones who killed me yet breathed life into me. The people who I thought I knew but turned out I never understood. Those very very few people who stabbed me as I cried for them, who went cruel as I went soft, who walked away at the first chance they got. Those are the people I don't know how to let go of. The kind of people that so many unanswered questions revolve around, that they remain a mystery I try to unravel every single day. Those are the people I can not forgive. And can not forget.