The final betrayal is in forgetting
...what aches the most is not losing someone, but being forced to forget them
Author’s note: Best read with Holocene by Bon Iver humming in the background.
“Will you be okay?” you ask me.
“Yes, I will be,” I say through tears, with the conviction of someone who has already lived through heartbreak enough times to know that survival is inevitable.
Because the truth is: you’re always okay, eventually. Even when it feels like the end of the world, it never really is. The world keeps moving, and so do you.
So why did this loss cut so deeply? Why did I cry as though it was the first time I had ever broken?
Perhaps it was because I never told you, because I never let the words escape in their full force because it was too late. Perhaps it was because I never let you feel the full weight of my love, the depth of the quiet devotion that lived in the spaces between my breaths, the afternoons spent thinking of you, the small, tender ways I held you in my mind.
Now, you will never know. And the absence, this silence between us, feels almost as cruel as the ending itself, as though my love never truly existed if it was never witnessed.
The saddest part of heartbreak is not the separation. It is the slow and quiet process of unspooling yourself from someone else’s life. It is not the final goodbye, but the endless repetition of small goodbyes: to the morning routines, to the shared language, to the laughter that once tethered you to each other. What aches the most is not losing someone, but being forced to forget them.
Forgetting feels like the ultimate betrayal: because to forget is to erase. To forget is to admit that what once defined you has no place in the person you are becoming. Love does not end at the moment of parting. Love ends in the forgetting, whenthe private rituals of remembrance stop showing up.
So why did I cry?
I cried because in that moment I knew that one day, I would wake up and you would not be the first thing on my mind.
I knew that one day, I would not think of you with the tenderness I reserve for things that no longer exist. Like the songs I once played on loop until the meaning slipped away, worn thin from repetition. One day, you would sit somewhere in my memory like that. Not forgotten, just softened by distance. Familiar, but out of reach. A place I used to know.
One day, the ghost of you, the version I conjure in my solitude, the one I found myself talking to would stop appearing. I would wake up and forget why we broke up. The shape of your smile would slip from memory and even our most cherished memories would gather dust, tucked away in some hidden chamber of my mind.
I knew that one day, I would wake up and feel nothing but indifference toward you. I would proceed to remove your timezone from my phone and wonder why I ever thought to keep it there in the first place. One day, you would stop existing for me.
And in that moment, I would wonder if I ever truly knew you at all.
Still, there are days when the world falls quiet, when the afternoon light softens into a haze, and you return to me in fragments: the tilt of your head, the curl of your laugh, the weight of a phrase you once said. I remember you suddenly like a question pressing against my thoughts, and I let myself wander back, following the ghost along its silent corridors, letting it brush against me for a moment before it fades, slipping away.
In this endless cycle of remembering and losing you, I feel something like amnesia, a taste of the grief of true forgetting, because I never know when I will remember you for the last time. Each recollection could be the final one, and that uncertainty makes every memory tremble, tender and terrible at once, a sweetness threaded with sharp edges.
I hoard these sudden returns. I cradle them like fragile flames, knowing that one day they will sputter and vanish, leaving nothing behind.
And perhaps that is the deepest ache: to grieve someone endlessly, not through their absence, but through the slow, creeping erasure of them from memory, each moment of forgetting a small wound, each remembered fragment a fleeting balm.
So I end with the quietest, most selfish wish, whispered into the hollow spaces you left behind: I hope you remember me too. And sometimes, as the light softens or the world grows still, I hope you might read these words and, for a brief moment, remember me as I remember you.
With love, from the spaces between memory and forgetting,
Anna 💕
Listening to holocene while reading this felt cruel. Thanks dear author.
you are a mistress of your craft, anna. it is an unbridled pleasure to be reading your work again 🖤