We go from not knowing of a person’s existence to knowing what shirt they’ll be wearing on a specific day or what song they’re going to be playing first thing in the morning. And when we go back to being strangers again, you’ll still know what their coffee order is going to be that morning. No matter how things ended. No matter how you’re feeling about them. You’ll still know.
Our brains have the (painfully) beautiful ability of clearly remembering how certain people or events made us feel. So we kind of always tend to associate certain people to certain feelings. Your first love probably reminds you of pure and innocent puppy love. Your second love of that thrill of toxic excitement. And so on. But when two people part their own ways, they can’t just erase what has been felt or what they have learnt from and about each other. So where do these emotions go? Where does this knowledge go? Where does the love go?
If you throw a stone from point X it will land on point Y and it will stay there. If you cut a cake in two there’s always going to be a crack in the middle of it. If you tear a piece of paper you can fix it with tape, but the slit will still be very visible. When you love someone, you’re throwing that stone. And when you leave, the stone is still going to be there. Nobody is ever going to move it. So can we actually forget someone who we once loved?
I might be a romantic but I’m also optimistic, and sometimes (rarely) realistic: don’t worry, you will get over that person who broke your heart. People come and go and you’ll meet so many souls and you’ll feel so many feelings and you’ll experience so many different types of love. So it is possible to fall out of love, it is possible to get over someone, it is possible to change your opinion about them. But in the process of doing so, it is helpful to know that when you love someone, it’s like you get a tattoo of their name across your heart. And that simply doesn’t go. However, like all tattoos, it will fade with time.
Side note: if you happen to wake up one morning wondering if they are simultaneously drinking a double shot espresso with a side of sparkling water, or if that one song comes up on the radio and causes your heart to slowly break, please know there truly is nothing more beautiful than our bodies’ ability of making us feel emotions that we thought were once buried. And if you’re still able to feel (whatever the emotion is) you win. You’ll always win.