Eternal Sunshine?

I'm sure most of us have seen that movie. If you haven’t, I recommend it. If you haven't, this is the general movie concept: Girl and guy live in this world where you can erase your memory of segments of your life. Girl and guy date, girl and guy break up, girl is upset and schedules a memory erasing of her and guy's mind. Girl and guy meet again, coincidentally, and date again. Guy's memory is triggered and he suddenly begins to remember everything……


I think about it all the time, what it would be like if our world was like that.
...What I would be like if our world was like that.
.…What I would be like if I erased you from my mind.

-I would not be writing this blog, obviously

-I would be very bad at making eye contact
-I would have wasted about 300 more hours of my life sleeping
-My parents would like me a little more
-I would like Plato a little less

Why didn’t you wait for me?

-I wouldn’t have known what being in the back of a cop car feels like
-I wouldn't eat ketchup with cheese
-I wouldn't have embraced nerdiness
-I wouldn’t know what summer nights smelled like

What does she have that ripped you away so suddenly?

-I wouldn't have learned how to appear stoic and steel-hearted outwardly
-I would have more faith in the world
-I wouldn't have learned how to open up to people or myself quite as well
-I wouldn't have learned how to shut people out quite as well

Are you going to marry her?

-I wouldn't be so miserable
-I wouldn’t know anything about love

Ultimately, do the cons cancel out the pros? Was the good worth the bad? Did I spend all this time to end back up at ground zero? Is my instability now equivalent to my instability before?

How did you manage to shred this full, glowing, beating thing under my sternum into the tattered bits of a used, incomplete 500-piece puzzle?

I’m not being pretentious when I say that I enjoy feeling strong emotions. I like the occasional gripping feeling of fear, the fluttering distraction of apprehension, the sure and solid blow of grief. It reminds me that I’m still alive, that I’m still human, that I have not yet been consumed by the apathy of society or engulfed into a meaningless existence without passion or elevated sentiment. But when will this end? Will it ever end?

Will you please at least protect those missing pieces that you still have?



Oh, eternal sunshine, give me a spotless mind.