The Things We Can't Unsee
I have known love, and love has won. I burned my fingers on the sun...
Have you ever had it? You know, that thing. Perfection, beauty, the best of the best. The Great Ideal.
Have you ever held it? Have you ever felt it? All else melts away. Everything makes sense amidst a lifetime of confusion and chaos. Finally.
In the words of the Silver Apples (an obscure band from the 60’s),
I have known love, and love has won. I burned my fingers on the sun.
When I reflect upon my life, I see these moments. Perfect love, perfect safety, perfect innocence. Once they are seen, they can’t be unseen. Once they are known, they set the bar for all else that follows. Everything else inevitably falls short. Reality sets in as they fade away, like clutching a fistful of sand. No matter how hard you grasp, the sand trickles out. No matter how hard you try, you can’t get it back again. These are the ghosts of love, haunting us with wonders of what might have been.
On the flip side of the same coin are the horrors. They, too, can’t be unseen. Once they happen to us, or we give ourselves to them, there’s no turning back. The mental images form in our minds, and they stay with us for the rest of our lives. You can’t unthink a thought, and you can’t unsee an image. They become a part of who we are. We can block them out, pretend they don’t exist and bury them well below our conscious experience, but they live on, waiting in the wings. These are the ghosts of death, haunting us with wonders of what might have been avoided.
These are the things we can’t unsee. They are the sources of shame, guilt, resentment, self-hatred, nihilism, despair - all the muck and the grime that live within us. They inform us about who we are, what life means to us and what the world represents. In many ways, they become us. Our actions, behaviors and personalities are simply responses to these things. This may seem dire, but I promise there’s a moral to this story. Now for the kicker - they are perfect.
Without our experiences, both good and bad, our lives could not unfold throughout time as they are meant to. Something “bad” that happened 5 years ago is preventing something “good” from happening today? I say let it be so, all that means is that new doors are waiting in the unknown to be opened and explored. Nothing is set in stone, there is no perfection, and the only expectations we must live up to are our own - no one else’s. The things we can’t unsee push and pull us towards the people we want to be through our choices and actions. Without them, we’d be amorphous blobs.
Life can be heavy. Things that seem inconsequential often turn out to be the things that change our lives, for better or for worse. The message is, as always, to take care of yourself. Future you deserves all the joy you’re wishing for yourself today. You are the only person who can give that to yourself - don’t take that lightly.
P.S. If you’ve enjoyed my writing thus far, I’m adding a new daily reader to the mix. It will be released every night, and it will consist only of short poems. I’ve made a commitment to write more and expand my style, so this is the first step in that direction. You can find the link to Modern Bronze’s “Poetry in the Dark” below: