Romance In A Column

chapter six,

Scientifically speaking, forgetting is an inevitability. Like death, it's an inescapable fact and an unalterable prediction. Such to a point there's even a neuron designated to the disposal of unimportant information.

That brings alight a new perspective towards everything one, to date, remembers. It means every single memory still knitted into our brains has left an imprint—a footstep on the complex vastitude that's the human mind. It suggests every single memory has an existential purpose which, in itself, is a magnificently terrifying thought.

Purpose is the most consoling yet dread-setting concept of them all. You see, people constantly strive towards something; an ambition, a dream, a material good or a spiritual reward to name a few. They're often derived from their interpretation to their reason to exist. An answer to the question existent since the dawn of time: what are we here for?

The thing about purpose is expectations. Deluding oneself into believing whatever thing is the reason for their existence entails, eventually, achieving it. But inadequacy and external factors are often unbeatable obstacles and lives aren't elaborate movies written with happily ever afters, that's to say—as sad as it might be—whatever a person might've spent their entire life chasing isn't obtainable. An anticlimactic ending, which would bring about the question if said life was even fulfilling to begin with.

There will never be empirical evidence behind people's speculations regarding why—in this particular moment in history, in this particular world amongst the many throughout the galaxies, into the existence they lead—were they created.

But as magnificently terrifying as failure is, more so to such a grand scale, there's a simple blandness to a purposeless life that's inadmissible to the human subconscious because even conformists want something, minuscule as it might be. And people will embark towards whatever they believe will eventually lead to their version of success at the risk of having an anticlimactic life, an unfulfilling one.

At the very end of it all, no matter how spectacular or the contrary one's life was—Hazel Grace in one of Eryn's memories said—oblivion is inevitable. 

Sabine Sallow, a sibling Eryn isn't particularly close with, is the self-proclaimed epitome of a romantic comedy enthusiast. And though Eryn never found comedy in The Fault In Our Stars it was her sister's favorite, the memory of Sabine reading out loud the lines of the novel while they cleaned the kitchen after lunch are memories Eryn rarely revisited.

At the time Melina had already gone off to college and the dynamic inside the household hadn't changed drastically. Eryn was still a child in their eyes and in comparison to themselves, while her sisters—now minus the eldest—were the parental figures.

Now as a twenty-one year old, the greater part of the lines a younger Sabine recited hold no meaning since they hold no place in Eryn's memory.

Yet, deeply rooted in her mind is the Sunday afternoon alike any other in the Sallow household, Eryn scrubbing the plates clean after another lunch where her mother didn't accompany them at the table. The scene was a recurrent one, Sabine sitting cross legged a top of the counter—she had an immunity to the post-meal chores since she was the only eligible one for the cook position—while Julie dried the plates, pans alike the utensils and Amalie stored them away to their designated cupboards.

The silence in the diminutive kitchen would otherwise be welcoming if it wasn't for the tension between Amalie and Julie over an insignificance in the present time the fraternal twins probably couldn't remember. Sabine, in her constant need to fill moments of quietness and dissipate tension, went about her reading routine as if nothing.