on remembering and forgetting

In the film The Lunchbox, Irrfan Khan (a charismatic actor who I enjoyed watching immensely but who, in his late 40s, is hardly convincing as a widower who has supposedly been at his office job for 35 years and is about to retire) says at one point, “I think we forget things if we have no one to tell them to." 

For me, it’s not quite that simple. I think that when I have no one to tell, I forget the things I want to remember and remember the things I want to forget. The feelings I need to expel sometimes have nowhere to go, and so they stay with me, and the things I want to remember are never made real because I have nobody to talk about them with–the act of telling a thing to someone I share a connection with can make what feels ephemeral when it is mine and mine alone instead feel lasting and concrete.

I sometimes think about all those years from which I have fewer memories than I think years should leave a person with. Those were years during which I was working shitty jobs and was slowly working toward transition and a more fulfilling professional life. The time was necessary, and it has paid off, but my personal life was largely nonexistent for quite a while. I think this is why I’m also now acutely aware that, for me anyway, things done wholly for oneself, that are not of or for a connection that we share with others, are meaningless. And so I think again of this, articulated so clearly and beautifully in Masha Tupitsyn’s book Love Dog, one of the dominant feelings of my life today:

image