Things that used to be

[adrotate banner="13"]

[feather_share show="twitter, google_plus, facebook, reddit, tumblr" hide="pinterest, linkedin, mail"]

The first day on the job with The Silhouette, I broke my phone, got all but nine of my business cards wet during a violent fall downpour, and mentally and emotionally abandoned a four-month long project.

It was an awful start to what I had thought would be a wonderful year.

Little did I know back then that Zayn Malik would leave One Direction, Parks and Rec would end on such an unsatisfying note, and Ted would end up with Robin (can I have the last nine years of my life back please?).

The point is, after three years of starting school with high hopes, I’ve faced the unfortunate reality of being disappointed. Nothing ever goes as planned, and every attempt to keep things constant, to minimize the effort of everyday affairs, is ultimately unsuccessful. I know this isn’t news for anyone—it wasn’t really a new revelation for me either—but I still fall into the same train of thought year after year, surprised when things don’t go as I had written down in my Google calendar.

University terms feel short when work keeps piling up and no one has time for anything, but a lot can happen in these eight months. Amidst the work and busyness and Big Thing That Happened This Week, we can lose things and people, because, well, that’s just how life works. And we have to keep going regardless, even though we feel numb or like we would rather lie down in the middle of campus on a slushy February day.

We keep going because we’ve learned to forget.

Faces and things you used to know begin to fade further into blurry oblivion. The harder you blink, the faster they fade. And since you’re in bed, trying to keep what’s left in your head, you can’t chase after them. A wave of calm will rush over you as you watch familiar things turn into nothing but silhouettes of the past.

This is how we forget. This is how we become okay with forgetting.

We don’t just do this alone in our rooms; we do it collectively, too.

Being this year’s Opinions editor has given me the pleasure of trying to understand the landscape of student thought on campus every week. I have papers on papers of reminders of what we were talking about this week and that week. I’ve had conversations with students who vehemently disagree with each other, with students who are afraid of even having the discussion in the first place, and with students who, above all, just want us to remember that That Thing happened. It was important and it happened. So why don’t you care?

I’ve also learned that we have the same discussions every year, and we reach the same conclusion, every year. We decide that sometimes we just can’t agree on everything. Sometimes it’s okay to have different moral foundations and ideological starting points. And sometimes it’s really not okay. You’re a horrible person and how dare you settle on a different version of truth than me? Don’t get me wrong; it’s a legitimate question. Truth is power, or power is truth, or something like that.

I’ve learned that people will always hurt each other. They will always get in each other’s way, and we find that public places of conversation, like this section, for example, are an arena of constant struggle between dissenting voices and attempts to find solutions for problems that feel permanent.  Some feel hurt because things have been taken from them. Others feel hurt because nothing was ever given to them. And others, still, feel hurt because even when they write angry words and shout through headlines, they are not heard. No matter where we fall, we have one thing in common: we want to be heard and we want people to remember that That Thing happened.

But week after week, many of us close our eyes and forget—we let lessons we learned last month turn into blurry outlines. We refuse to feel what we felt then and next time they come around, we’re still trying to forget. We’re good at it. And it’s easy. Just blink a little harder.

But those who have lost someone important in their life or felt the pain of a broken heart know that the silhouettes of Things That Used To Be never truly go away. After a few months, or years, you learn to ignore them, you become indifferent to their blurred outlines and their indecisive nature. You have no patience for them anymore. But they’re still here. They’re not here to serve some higher purpose. They’re here because they used to be. It’s simple and meaningless and gross. It makes you sick to your stomach because they feel empty and so do you.

But whatever happens, you can always look back at them and remember that it happened. It was important and it happened. And you care.

At times, we engage in public discourse unwilling to look back at silhouettes of the past. We refuse to acknowledge what’s already been said, written, and fought over. We see our words as individual creations, singular articles on some page that maybe no one will read. But nothing can ever stand by itself. To say, to write, to create, we need context, we need to remember.

And trust me, after 24 weeks of trying to create some sort of blurry mess out of our collective memories and pain, out of our collective disagreements and outrages, I’ve learned they’re not that scary.

Let the silhouettes sit at the edge of your memory, and don’t be afraid to look back. They’re probably just sitting around, indifferent of your existence, unaware of your gaze, and more frightened than you will ever be. So look back and remember, and most importantly, remember how easily we forget.

[feather_share show="twitter, google_plus, facebook, reddit, tumblr" hide="pinterest, linkedin, mail"]

[adrotate banner="12"]