K-Quote of the Day:

“I’m sure you have things you miss in the old times…
that you can’t go back to.”

– Hotel Del Luna
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Someone once told me a story of the time he found out his mother had aborted a sibling a couple of years ago. He was inundated with a massive barrel’s worth of a cocktail of emotions, outraged and devastated and angry and upset. He felt the loss of a sibling he never knew existed. But what had upset him the most was this: When I asked her why she didn’t tell me, she said she forgot about it. Forgot! Who forgets an abortion???!

It sounds horrible and neglectful. But isn’t forgetting a blessing? If she hadn’t forgotten, she would be living with raw pain every day. We do move on with time. Time is a blessing because it lets us forget the intensity of the emotions of that moment. When I told him this, he was blown away. It’s not that his mother didn’t care—whatever circumstances were surrounding the abortion didn’t matter. It was that she once felt an intensity of pain that no one would want to wish on their worst enemy. Moments of remembering were fine. A lifetime of remembering is a mental prison sentence.

It’s the same principle with the things we can’t return to. The beautiful memories, the times we wish to return to. They’re like flowers preserved between two pieces of clear glass: beautiful to look at, but unreachable, and if we ever succeed in shattering the glass to get to the flowers, they’d be vulnerable to rotting with time. Those things we miss in the old times…they’re beautiful where they are. The blessing is in the fact that they are moments of happiness locked in time, those moments we remember, that we want to remember. It’s a blessing to forget the sad moments. It’s a blessing to remember the happy ones. And it’s a blessing they’re all locked in time, because they are preserved where they belong.

Here’s to making new moments we can miss in the future, and resolutely plowing through the sad moments in the present, knowing we’ll long forget the pain they came with.