NOTHING
There’s not a damn thing you can do about it. Once it’s done, it’s done. People always tend to act before they think. Once they realized they’ve made a mistake, they think it’s so easy to fix.
Well, I’ll tell you something right now: mistakes are not easy to fix. You can’t take a hammer and just smash something to fit together again. You can’t take a screwdriver and tighten a screw before it falls off.
A mistake isn’t something physical that you can fix. It’s an emotional issue and sometimes you can fix it and sometimes you can’t. If you can fix it, you’re extremely lucky.
If you make a mistake against another person, like a friend, then the first reaction is to say, “I’m sorry.” How often does that work? If you’re a child then it works all the time like a charm because neither child knows any better. They believe that the word sorry is a band aid. So, once the word is spoken, the band aid is sticking and all is forgiven and forgotten.
If you’re an adult, does sorry really work? Sometimes it does, but depending on how serious the situation is, it doesn’t work at all. As we grow up we realize that words are not band aids. Just like mistakes, they are not tangible, they are emotional. It is not so easy for an adult to forgive and forget.
They tell you to forgive and forget all the time. “They” meaning people in general. So many people say it, but do they really follow it? How many people actually follow their own advice? I have to say that forgiving and forgetting is a lot easier said than done. It’s harder than it looks. There are some instances when you can forgive and forget easily, but with big problems it takes a lot of strength to forgive and forget.
Forgiving means that you accept the person’s apology after they have wronged you. Once they’re forgiven, they feel better and the problem never happened. However, you were the one that was hurt. Can you really be sure that the person isn’t going to do it to you again? Do you really forget?
To forget means that you never think about the situation again. Do you really push the situation completely out of your mind? Maybe; I’m not entirely sure how the mind works, but I do know that it is capable of doing incredible things. Maybe you can forget about the certain situation for the time being, but it’s never really gone. Once it’s in your mind, it’s there to stay.
What if something similar happens whether it’s good or bad? Things can trigger lost memories. If you suddenly remember what happened you can feel that pain all over again. So, no we never really forget because our mind does not allow us to.
It takes great will power to override the mind. We forgive and forget something bad that has happened to us, but we never truly forget. However, we try. By trying we are overriding the mind and we do manage to forget these things for a little while. So the pain will come back eventually because it will never be truly gone. However, I can try to forget about it for a little while at a time.
“I said,” a voice broke me out of my thoughts, “do you forgive me?”
I shook my head slightly to clear my head. I blinked my eyes a couple of times to bring back my vision. My friend was standing right in front of me.
Friend… I haven’t spoken to her in a long time. I believe it has been a couple of months.
She was looking at me expectantly. She had worry in her eyes as though there was a chance that I was not going to forgive her. She left me at the beginning of our freshman year to hang out with a bunch of seniors. She thought she was being cool. She thought she was a hot-shot for hanging out with the upper class-men. Now she was suddenly asking for my forgiveness now that the seniors had graduated and we still had a couple weeks left of school.
“I’m sorry for everything I did this year. I thought I could get a step up if I hung out with them.” She hung her head and stared at the floor. “Once they graduated, they told me that they were college students now and couldn’t be seen hanging out with a high-schooler.”
“So they gave you a taste of your own medicine.” I retorted. I didn’t mean to sound so rude, but it was more or less the same situation—except the college kids were much older so they had a legit reason as my friend and I were the same age.
She looked me in the eye shocked. She opened her mouth to say something, but changed her mind. She turned around and began to walk away. Apparently, that comment made her believe that I wasn’t going to forgive her.
“Wait,” I grabbed her shoulder, “I didn’t mean it to be mean. I do forgive you… but you’re my best friend and you ditched me for an entire year. Freshman year, too. It’s a difficult time in high school because it’s our first year. I want to be friends again, but this isn’t something that I’m going to be able to forget quite easily.”
“Right,” she smiled sheepishly at me.
The bell rang.
I sighed and wrapped my arm around her. She was upset because of what the college kids did to her, not because of what she did to me. I was going to end up consoling her.
“We’re going to be late for homeroom.” I started walking her to her classroom.
No, I was not going to be forgetting about this one for a long time.
Sunday Morning
An abandoned house. A heist. A new puppy. Lost Love. From unbelievable to true-to-life, this flash fiction collection will take you to many places and get to know various characters. With no two stories alike each is thought-provoking, emotional,...
