He gazed into the city view, with a half-burnt cigarette between his slender fingers. He looked down and sank his gaze into the scattered ashes on the ground, and all they could do was represent all of the memories he wished he could forget.
But the ashes in his mind were the ones the wind could never blow away.
Luckily enough, this is not a journal entry. Not a realistic one where I would rant about how unsolvable my problems are.
This is about a man.
And the man in this story is lucky enough to have a magical woman appearing beside him, offering him a gift of some sort. A gift for him to forget memories of his choice. A gift to forget all of the torturing constrictions that his mind has shackled him to. A gift for him to, perhaps, deal with the pain, without the reminders of how the cuts began to bleed.
How the scars refused to heal.
A gift of consignment of his mind, to oblivion.
And all he had to do was to close his eyes, and swallow a pill.
And as he was speaking with that particularly ethereal woman, the voices in his mind started to warn him.
What if it was a scam? What if it's a drug he could never get over from? But then again, another voice argued that his pain had became such an addiction to him anyway. So what's the big deal? But what if it makes him forget everything? Even all of the good memories?
She immediately reassured him that it was bound to happen anyway. The brain is built as a cascade of memories, like a spider web bridging all of the distances together to form what we call our consciousness.
She reassured, that the pill will only react to the most painful part of the web. The constricting part. The part where the web kept you awake at night. The part where you can hear the spider crawling with its disturbing legs and its traumatized eyes filled with such terror and such sympathy.
As you grow old, the web falls apart anyway.
It's just a matter of time.
But she said, the pill offers an alternative. The chance, and the space to build new webs. Or at least, if you're reluctant, the chance to have some space to breathe.
Of course, he was skeptical.
But he took the pill anyway.
______________________________
Few days passed.
He took the pill with a glass of water, and the voices in his mind were screaming and begging him not to take it. All of his survival instincts were ringing loudly and were giving him warnings. He started shaking, and he had goosebumps all over his body.
But the pain for the past few years had finally done him in, and he swallowed the pill.
Nothing major happened. He could still remember everything, and ever so vividly.
Maybe she got her a fake pill, and maybe it was just a prank.
He started to stare into the empty space again.
Perhaps there are no quick fixes for his pain, and perhaps it was good that he learned it this way.
______________________________
Few weeks and perhaps months passed by.
As he was looking at his reflection in the small mirror in his bathroom, he caught himself thinking about some parts of the past that would occasionally haunt him, and he was replaying it all in a hazy detail, like navigating through a foggy forest with green, mossy trees.
It's not like he was running from a grizzly bear, or hunted by wolves.
He was just lost. Or even more accurately, he never had any directions in the first place.
And then it hit him.
He couldn't remember the smallest things he could vividly recall so much all this time.
He was no longer haunted by the details; no ghosts hanging on his shoulders, no figures lurking at the corner of his eyes, no silhouettes drowning him in his sleep.
And all of the fears and anxiety, that something might go wrong, that the pill might make him forget everything important, is finally gone.
For once, a story ends with a happy ending. A chapter overwriting the whole story without it having corny and dramatic turns.
He forgot about it.
Isn't that all that mattered?
