I am not sure what it takes to forgive and forget. Good people forgive and feel redeemed, and then they go to heaven, they absolutely must go to heaven if forgiving brings redemption… big I’m sure they are, it takes a big person to forgive and go on with his or her life and never again have negative feelings for the person who caused something so big that forgiveness was required. Forgiveness… should it be a privilege given only to those who have asked for forgiveness and have been forgiven? Can someone seriously be ever so totally pure at heart and mind that can take that privilege in hand and pronounce the words “I forgive you”?
I’m not a good or a big person.
Now, it takes more than just a good and big person to forget… it takes a saint if I’m not mistaken. I don’t really see how can someone just erase an event from his life as if nothing ever happened and go on without a simple recollection of the facts that prompted the need… the urge… the desire to forget.
I’m not a saint.
All this was in my mind the past few days as I wandered around the street of London. It’s a beautiful city, a place I like to go back over and over again. It was nine years ago that I went for the first time and my eyes set on it at sunrise, my favourite time of the day. As usual, when things feel terribly wrong in my life, my brain sets itself in dual mode, as that morning did, so I fell in love with England and its foggy weather, and the churches I never had a chance to visit.
As I walked looking at beautiful and unaffordable places I would love to peek-in, I was transported nine years back in time to a day I was picked up from the airport by a stranger… he was short and big, bigger and shorter than everyone around him and I felt the first signal of discomfort. I was expecting to see someone fit and of average height waiting for me, someone with a cane due to the loss of a leg, some kind of patriot as the description I was given of him said, but it was a totally different person the one in front of me, he looked as if he jumped out from bed and put some clothes on without even cleaning himself… “it must be the time of the day” I thought to myself, after all, he must have had to wake up really early to be able to pick me up before sunrise. He was standing there, smiling at me, his lack of personal care was daunting… he was smiling at me with stained teeth, I imagined it must take many years and a lot of smoking to bring teeth to that point.
He picked me up a few more times and always looked the same. I learned with time that he didn’t care much about hygiene, he lived from place to place sleeping on the floor, eating with his hands, wearing the same soiled jeans over and over totally unaware of the meaning of self-respect – but he talked constantly about it.
He was a storyteller, an illegal immigrant, a fugitive, a criminal… and it was on one of those rides along the streets of London when he showed me a place he said he used to live in when he was working for the National Security Agency. I looked at the white building with fascination, it adorned the street it was built on, and as the building and the street, everything around was beautiful, as beautiful as only exorbitant amounts of money can create… and he said he lived there, in one of the most expensive places in London… and it was there, right on that street, that these past days I found myself transported back in time… and on that same street, with all its beauty and luxury, a rat was wandering around the rubbish looking for something to eat… and a hole to sleep in.
I learned more than what I have ever wanted to know about the stranger who picked me up at the airport the first time I arrived to London, but I never learned the secret to being able to erase and rewind.
I do believe that books belong in bookshelves… they should never be burnt.