Impossible to Forget

by Imogen Clark

The unlikeliest people are hiding halos beneath their hats. Anonymous

I will never understand a universe that lets a parent die before they have finished preparing their child to live. It’s all kinds of wrong. Yet we are where we are.

‘You’re so busy looking forward to what is to come that you’re missing what you have in the here and now.’

Her life had shown her that love was for the weak, for those who lacked imagination, for misguided seekers of the ‘happy ever after’.

There was something about old friends, she thought, a special depth of understanding that you never quite managed to reach with friends made later in life. The people who knew you when you were learning to know yourself had a more honest picture. They’d seen you when you were not yet entirely formed, when your outer shell hadn’t quite sealed around you. As a result, there was less pretending. Friends like that would never let you get away with the stories that you could spin around yourself with newer people. And even though that could be scarily exposing, it was also good to be around them. You could skip past all that small talk and pleasantries stuff and cut straight to the heart of whichever matter needed to be discussed.

You got one spin on the merry-go-round. Surely it was a person’s responsibility to make their ride as exciting as they possibly could?

Life wasn’t like a see-saw where you could only be at the top if someone else was at the bottom.

‘I find that if something is important to you, it has a way of staying in your memory,’ he said. ‘I love travelling, seeing new places, meeting new people, so when I do it, it would be pretty stupid of me to just forget everything I’d seen as soon as I left.’

If she stopped and thought for too long, she worried that she might go to pieces, and she simply didn’t have the time.