I always try to not remember, rather than forget.

Today is my brother's fifteenth birthday. Mom got him a cell phone. It's about time.

It's almost exactly the same as my old phone. The little message alert tone kind of sent me into a nostalgic panic attack, because the last time I remember hearing it, I was getting a message from Him (not Him as in capitalized to show deity but as in capitalized to signify a certain him, ie: the Him that has left me slightly more emotionally traumatized and definitely more untrusting, bitter, resentful, and unstable than I was before He kind of went from being in the background of the grand scheme picture of my life to being scrawled all over the front of it about ten months ago).

I kind of wanted to throw up a little. Why does this have to be so hard? Why does it have to be so hard to shove those feelings into the gutter and leave them to rot? He hurt me. I hurt myself. I don't want those residual (well, far more than residual) feelings sticking around to continue hurting me.

I guess like Keren Ann says, I do try to not remember, rather than forget. Forgetting makes it like as though things never happened. I almost want them to have never happened. And yet at the same time, I wouldn't give them up for anything. I was happy. I was perfectly and exquisitely happy. I thought He was too. He wasn't. And you can't make anyone be happy. Personal choice. He chose to not be happy with me. And now there is no we. Ever.

And I'm not happy with it.

People come and go and walk away, but I'm not going anywhere.