VenusAtFar

Maybe I don’t fear being forgotten. Maybe I fear having meant nothing.

It rained the night before. This morning, the sun finally decided to show up, flooding the living room where I sit with its promise of a good day…or perhaps even a good week.

So why, on such a beautiful morning, the thought of oblivion suddenly crossed my mind rearing its ugly head?

Maybe because I once again remembered the face of the man I used to love. Someone once told me I am peculiar because I am not afraid of melancholy and almost make a home inside it.

I turn every little thing said over in my head, making everything a courtroom trial, with myself cross-examining myself. It makes everything hard to forget. And honestly, I do not know if it is a curse or a blessing.

However, the truth is, I have prayed to God to remove every memory of the face of the man that left me. I don’t care how drastic the move is. I just don’t think I can deal months of recalling someone who’s no longer a comfort to me.

I wanted to forget…

Yet strangely, I am afraid of oblivion. The other side of it. I don’t want to be forgotten. 

Augustus Waters in The Fault in Our Stars when asked about his fears answered with a philosophical air as I would like to imagine it, “My fears? “I fear oblivion’ he said. “I fear it like a proverbial blind man fears the dark”

To which Hazel Grace Lancaster replied rather hesitatingly. Hazel reminds him that there will come a time when all of us are dead, when there will be no human beings left to remember that we ever existed. She said that not even the memory of Aristotle or Cleopatra will matter. Oblivion is inevitable. Everything we built and wrote and thought and discovered will be forgotten. I especially love the part where she said that maybe that time is coming soon or maybe its million years away but even if we survive the collapse of our sun, we will not survive forever. Did Hazel remind me of my own insignificance? Ouch.

If I was in the middle of the room with them, I would blush. There is nothing sexier than a good banter between two people who like each other. To the man who left me, is this the depth you were looking for when we were still together?

I digress. Once again. 

I am similar to Augustus. I fear oblivion. The fear might have come from my desire to touch every stranger’s life that strays into mine. I long to leave a positive mark in another person’s life so much that when someone remembers my face, he/she would smile.

I wouldn’t necessarily want statues erected in my name and biographies written about me. I want evidence that my existence mattered.

If I could, I want to make the world a better place than when I found it.

Maybe be a great lawyer and defend someone with no one willing to stand beside them. Maybe I would be someone who would free a person who has been falsely accused and open a door to an entirely new course in his life. 

Or maybe smile to a stranger I would never cross paths with again. But at the very least, I am able to bring sunshine to his life and make him feel he matters because a stranger on a random day smiled at him. He might have had the worst day of his life. Or in the brink of giving up. Perhaps, a smile would be the very same thing that would keep him going that day. Maybe he will remember it for five minutes. Maybe for five years. Maybe he will forget it entirely. I will probably never know but at least, I have hope.

Or maybe help and guide a stranger find his way to his destination. I would simply smile as I tell him directions. That way it would ease his fear of being lost. That would encourage him that it’s not so bad of an idea to ask. 

I can also volunteer to help in a program somewhere where there is humanitarian crisis. Imagine hugging them and bringing them some of the warmth that has been absent from their lives for so long. I would be able to lift their spirits dampened by disaster or crisis. And for a moment, make them remember that there is still tenderness left in the world. It might be temporary relief, but who knows if the warmth would stay with them even long after I am gone.

I don’t want people forgetting about me. I don’t want people wishing they have never met me.

I would hate it when someone would try so hard to erase me from their imagination. Because that would mean I did not do them any good. Because that would mean I caused damage. It’s a simplistic way of analyzing interactions, I know. People forget for many reasons. People leave. People move on. Even the people we love most eventually become memories, and memories themselves become hazy.

But I want to believe that if my face ever crosses someone’s mind years from now, there will be a little happiness attached to it.

Not because I was extraordinary.

Not because I changed the world.

But because, for however brief a time, I was kind.

And that’s the only hope I have against oblivion. Perhaps that is how I would want to be immortalized.