The Roark Referendum

Bad things are always easier to remember. They just are. For some reason, I can pinpoint all the tragic intances in my life and then I think about everything else in between. I've allowed my darkest hours to be these lesions that bookend my moments of happiness. Why isn't it the other way around?

I would go so far as to say I've allowed these moments to define my personality and my actions. I even cite them for the reasons I treat people the way that I do. I say what I want to say when I want to say it. Why? Because I am afraid the person who I want to say it to will die and I'll lose my opportunity to do just that. I have irrational phobias and superstitions--and I allow them to drive my behavior on a daily basis. But what really takes the cake is this--I act out of a fear of regret--not necessarily out of a sense of optimism.

Maybe it's a handicap I've taken on, the inability to look at the glass half full, the constant priority put on pointing out all that could and has gone wrong in the past, and moreover, the inability to recognize that we are not in the past. It's as if my memory is magnetically attracted to despondence. It actually takes a mental precedence over my fleeting moments of happiness.

We all worry about death and about the doom and gloom of how none of us are the exception to the end, and we give in to the unfortunate aspect of human nature that makes it much easier for us to feel sorry for ourselves than it is to pull ourselves out of those buckets of self loathing and false introspection. But what we should really be concerned with is another kind of exception.

This perennial idiom I'm referring to, the one that claims the effortlessness it takes to remember the bad over the good, meets its match when it comes to the romantic relationship. Having been on the receiving end of some rather excruciating breakups, what I recall the most is my fragmented concoction of the chronology and how in the days following the split, I allowed only the good memories to flood my mind and how that person brought me an unparalleled bliss and satisfaction for life. But why would I do such a thing?

In the wake of something that seemed so flawless, perhaps I put it on a pedestal and remembered it for something greater than it was. And even if it was really something--and I know that my recollections, while inundated with the threads of enchantment, were valid and worthy of that reminiscing, didn't I also owe it to myself to remember all the times I got my heart broken? Didn't I owe it to myself to remember why I wasn't deserving of such disregard from that person? Why, in the aftermath of this particular kind of anguish, is it so much easier to remember the good instead of the bad?

It's the ultimate reversal of fortune. A big part of me wants to chalk it up to a cruel joke, a product of an unknown cosmic architect that tries to teach us all a series of life lessons we may never fully come to understand. But it's not a consequence of fate or fortune.

It's just a long overdue realization. We are, in fact, the architects. Pedestals are lonely places full of storied principles and deprived of human emotion. And nostalgia, like every other aspect of the human spectrum can be built up with a facade or torn down with a single breath of disbelief.