We talk about remembering as a virtue. As if forgetting is a moral failure. As if the highest form of human being is having the ability to recall everything that ever happened.
I don't buy it. I think forgetting is a human good.
Forgetting is how the mind breathes. If we remembered everything with equal clarity, we'd never move. We'd be pinned under old versions of ourselves, forever obligated to explain them.
Memory feels more like a compression: it keeps the most vital moments that felt special, gently hiding some of the worst that we'd rather forget.
What people call "nostalgia" isn't about being accurate anyway. They're about absence. It's more about the space where something used to be, safe enough to feel again without getting hurt.
Nostalgia turns your past into an exhibit: pristine moments sealed into glass cases. You're allowed to look, but not to tamper. Nothing inside can change. Nothing inside can hurt you anymore.
If you remembered something exactly as it was, you wouldn't miss it. You'd just relive it. Again. And again. No distance, no mercy.
There are people I love whose voices I can't fully reconstruct anymore. Places I swear mattered that I can't draw a map of. Memories I wished remembering felt more lifelike. This used to scare me. Now it feels… kind.
And the best part of it all is that it makes the present even more precious.
The fact that I won't remember the exact shade of the sky tonight is the same reason I look at it longer. The fact that someone's laugh will be approximate is the reason I'll spend more time close with them. Forgetting is, oddly, an accomplice to love.
Even grief depends on forgetting. Forgetting of a raw edge. Editing out the saturation so you don't feel the same pain that it first gives you. It gives you something to hold without hurting just at the thought of it.
There is mercy in that.
Nostalgia isn't proof that we remembered well. It's proof that we've changed.
Forgetting is what lets the past stay beautiful without demanding that we live there.
And that's enough.
