“You are enough to drive a saint to madness or a king to his knees.” ~Grace Willows, To Kiss A King
We don’t remember everything.
We experience so much in our lives: our first breath, our first word, our first step, our first kiss, our first love and our first heartbreak.
Most of it, in the beginning, is beyond our capacity to recall.
The rest of it we forget. Whether by choice, or by chance we may never know, but we do nonetheless.
Why is that?
Does it even matter?
The why, I mean.
Are we meant to remember everything, or are we destined to only remember specific things, minute details that define our lives?
Love, for instance, is something we recall like a memorable song.
The lyrics, the melody, the feeling that it gave us in the moment…we recollect specific aspects when we hear that song, but our perception of it is altered with time.
There are instances when it takes us back to that moment, but no longer fills us with the jubilation, or the sorrow of that moment. Instead, it is merely a shadow of what it once was…and we reflect, either with indifference or with insight and we think about how far we have come.
I, for one, prefer to reflect on love.
Love.
The unforgettable storm of emotions that floods our hearts and rains through our eyes. The raging sea of our emotions that is capable of destroying us and cleansing us all at once.
Love, in all its glory is the only emotion that defines our lives, for it is known that what we do in the name of it echoes through eternity.
And it is for that reason that love is forever.
Everything about love changes us.
It is the reason the poet opens his or her heart to the world.
That action alone has an impact on the heart of another even centuries later.
Love is the reason one trades innocence for experience, and leaves us with regret.
Yet, love is the reason one will forgo the attention of many for the affection of one.
This is the beauty of love.
We can’t unthink, we can’t unsay, and we can’t undo what love has given us.
We can’t unremember, we can’t unfeel and we can’t unhear the whispers that warmed our hearts.
Truth is, we can’t unlove.
It is the Pandora’s Box of our lives.
It was never filled with the evils of the world. In fact, it is our inability comprehend love for what it truly is that prevents us from appreciating what it is meant to be.
This is our curse, and this is our blessing, because the immortality of love equates only with the immortality of the gods.
No one will ever appreciate something that will always be there, but when it is finite there is a genuine understanding that what is and will never be again may be lost to eternity. Akin to losing a tear to the ocean that will never be recovered, or tasted on parched lips hoping for the kiss that will satiate our thirst for affection.
I may someday lose my memory. I will even someday forget my first kiss, or my first love, but even the gods will never have the power to defy the Fates, because I was destined to love you and my love is the love of a romantic.
Forever.
Felix Alexander Writer 