Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

Not only is this my movie suggestion of the month but it's also the kind of movie that will make you stop and reflect a little about the kind of decisions you'd make should they be possible.

I always said that I'd be a happier person if I could dictate to my heart how it should feel; the way I see it, I'd save myself a hell of a lot of trouble…
I'd never considered though the possibility of forced Amnesia…
Or better yet… Erasure…
The possibility of erasing something or someone from your mind.
Imagine it…
You're happily living the relationship of your dreams when one fine day you accidentally catch your reason for living, screwing your best friend's brains out, a sport he's been entertaining for a while…
It's the kind of knowledge that tears a person a part, drives one to drink and causes the suicides of people who can no longer take the slow procedure of going insane.
Go ahead, picture it and feel it if you can…
The psychological torture.
No matter how long you imagined it; it felt a second too long didn't it?
And yet, this poor sod, who's one in many would have to live with this kind of anguish for days… weeks… months… until finally restoring his mind to some sane shadow of what he normally was before the incident.
But what if you could save yourself from it… forget you ever met that person.
If you could completely erase everything and every memory about them…
If you could… would you?

This question bothered me for the simple reason that it would eliminate the whole concept of “everything happens for a reason” and it would change my whole course of life, how would I learn my lessons if I can't remember them?
Who would I be if I hadn't gone through what I did?... or in this case, remember what I went through?
And then the question that bothered me the most is… if I could wipe my slate clean from only once incident or one person… what or who would I want to forget?

I pondered this for a while and came up with no concrete answers… In my mind I remembered times I wanted to erase and then moments later I'd want to unerase the very same ones.
Maybe I should start with the school bully, or that first boyfriend that went wrong, perhaps I should focus on the ex… or that one heartbreak that shook the very essence of me…
But all those I've already come through and survived to the point where they don't bother me anymore and in realizing that, I came to the conclusion that the person to wipe out should be the one presently taunting my dreams.
He invades my thoughts, steals my concentration and shakes my self-confidence.
A nuisance that neither fulfills destiny nor fades away and when I'm meant to be focused on more important things, I find myself wondering what he'd think about them…
Salvation!!!! Bring on the zapper… the dude in my dreams has got to go!

And yet…
I hesitated when I realized that I'd no longer wake up with that sensation that he's by my side, the smile on awakening from a dream with him and the warm feeling I get inside each time our eyes meet…
When we look at each other that way, I wonder if he's feeling what I'm feeling…
But the phone never rang, the sms didn't come and the e-mail wasn't replied to…
That's the kind of torture I'm talking about! The kind of distraction I don't want or need in my life and the weakness I had to get rid of eventually… so why not straight away?!
I looked for every piece of evidence that linked me to him, every written letter, every photograph and every memory I had of him ready to be lost and disposed of…
I hadn't even realized that I'd collected so much…
Looking myself in the mirror, I smiled with a certain amount of relief that finally all of him would be gone and I'd move on with someone else.
I couldn't help notice however, how calm my heart was taking the whole situation.
Well that's a change! For a stubborn heart you sure aren't putting up much of a fight right now!
My heart however, calmly told me why it had already won the fight.
“You can wipe away the memories; you can take every special moment and destroy it so that it never happened and you can forget that you ever felt attracted to the man…
But I won't forget, I'll never forget the timber of his voice and the depths of his eyes and when you see him for the first time, it will all just start over again because you can't and you won't escape the fate that was written for you”

And with that… I put away foolish thoughts and resigned myself to the fact that I can't control what I feel or go through and it's up to me to choose what I do with whoever and whatever happens in my life.

My heart is right, if the magnetic pull that attracts (or repels) me to a person could be explained then it could also be dealt with… but it can't and it's the emotion that needs to be lived to be understood. If there is such thing as reincarnation then it could explain why two people feel like they know each other forever upon their first encounter.
It's odd to think that I could've lived a thousand different stories with one person and even stranger that I can't remember what they are but I can inexplicably sense that I like/dislike, trust/distrust the person in front of me from the beginning. Is it extrasensory instinct or is my heart remembering a story my mind erased?

Watching this movie, I perfectly understood why God would choose amnesia each time a person reincarnated. How else would they overcome the eggs that can't be unscrambled?
A new beginning? Another chance? Do people keep coming back together until they've fulfilled their destiny and if so… why?
Have you ever watched someone walk away and felt totally at ease? I've been told that one tends to feel an overwhelming sense of relief at that moment, like an invisible chain is broken… karma they call it, the death of karma.
And then there are those who take your heart with as they leave and you know, that even though you may never see them again, the resolve is far from over.

I'm glad that Erasure as I've baptized it; isn't possible.
It would be a very tempting option to have to deny.
I believe in climbing over my obstacles instead of under them even if it takes longer than I'd like… as the song from the movie itself suggests;
“Everybody’s gotta learn sometime…”

What would you want to erase?
Would you ever erase me?