I rewatched Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind this weekend because…oh, I don’t know…I was ripe for a dose of heartbreak through art? It got me thinking (of course) of the evolution of relationships (and whether a course is alterable or reparable) and of the disloyalty of memory. It made me consider one emotionally and the other in much more clinical terms.
In the past few weeks, I’ve begun to understand how memory reflex dulls. In school girls’ terms, how you get over someone. And it’s been an interesting discovery. I’ve always suspected that I have a particularly efficient and usually cold-hearted memory. Too soon after you leave, I will forget your smell at night and the sound of you in the morning. How you took your coffee and what your favorite movie was and what you liked to eat. I will forget how you kissed, usually, and your parents’ names if I knew them and what you studied in college. I won’t remember the movies we saw together or whether we had a song (More and more, we don’t. Is that a product of aging?)
Eventually, I’ll mostly erase you altogether. And I don’t at all mean that this memory loss’s motivation is conscious or malicious; It simply occurs. I could hardly tell you the name of a friend I had in grade school or more than two or three teachers in junior high. I misplace last names and faces; Places, I guess, I remember.
In a recent go round, however, something in the split felt much more emphatically and permanently painful than usual (Or as a confidante posits, more intense because the dissolution so abruptly conflicted with my expectations for the tidy, controlled life I thought I had established and safeguarded. There may be merit to this argument.).
For weeks and months, it seemed everything would always remind me of this relationship and that every reminder would ignite a reaction of pain. Of betrayal and loss and rejection. What interests me from here is that for a long time, despite a very unpleasant severance, I still maintained a strong sentimental and affectionate response to memories of this relationship. Even as I was hurt, I still missed and longed for what I remembered. That in particular is kind of fascinating – that in certain cases, the power of memory and affection is strong enough to draw you to something even as it hurts you, even as the realistic possibility of it no longer exists.
In the past couple of months, that visceral reaction has begun to evaporate. In fact, I sat purposefully this weekend bringing up the relationship and prodding old memories like a physician. Does it hurt here? What about here? What greatly surprised me was not just the reduction of pain (Though I think there will probably always be sensitivity or discomfort in a situation that, as my friend says, ended in a way that altered your world view or sense of self and place. There is some hangover humiliation or ego soreness in being caught off-guard, in losing something you believed you had rights to, unexpectedly.) but the reduction in clarity of memory and its hair-trigger conjuring of tenderness.
I worked to summon a memory that authentically generated feelings of love or warmth or nostalgia and was surprised at the difficulty. Again, I do not mean that as any kind of boast or cruelty – I am certainly still affected in some ways. But what I mean to present, what is so objectively fascinating, is the way the connections have rusted or snapped. A thought of a person used to lead directly and intensely to an emotional memory that resulted in pain and desire. Now, I have fewer and fewer memories at all – though I don’t think I’ve consciously done anything to bury them or guard my mind from seeking them out – and those that do materialize do not have positive emotions, nostalgia or want tied to them. Frankly, they don’t generate many emotions at all. I am entirely surprised by how wholly the connection fades.
I watched this movie and I thought about the case being made for or against expunging each other in the rubble of a relationship. And it occurred to me that, for better or worse, once we sit through the initial discomfort, our minds mostly perform this erasure on their own. Mills told me this once, early on, about heartache and renewal (Maybe that is too light a word. What I mean, simply, is those months where you transition from the dismantling of one life in to another. Where you figure out how to regrow around a vacuum. Adaptation?). And of course I respect him, but his theory seemed incomprehensible for a long time.
I watched that movie again this weekend and I loved it, as always. For its guts. For getting it all just right. But for the first time, I was partially the scientist in the back of the theatre. Realizing that unwittingly, I have grown to find great comfort in the biological wisdom of the mind - and not just the heart.
1 day ago
