there are few things in this lifetime that remain until the last breath we take.
but somehow, we get these little things that will stay forever, and ever. maybe you call it your ‘canon events’ or your ‘core memories’, but there are no words that can quite give them justice.

i’m not talking about the traditionally painful moments that that wrote our antihero origin stories or the people who slipped their nails into our eyelids, draining every ounce of joy from the light behind them

i’m talking about the moments that profoundly change the way you view the world. the moments that send you into contended melancholy every time you think of them, kind of like the sensation of fulfilled emptiness you get when you finish a book you’ll never be able to read for the first time again.
it’s not sad though.
it’s a forlorn kind of happiness.

when i was in high school, my best friend and i had this habit of conjuring up what we believed to be rebellion. we would go to the park when our parents thought we were practicing our sports. we would giggle as we tasted our first breaths of freedom

but there was one specific moment that has become what i would call a forget-me-not
an evening i will never let go of.

it was our very first sleepover, we decided to go on a little hike looking for answers from our local psychic. we walked, and walked, and walked for what felt like hours and minutes, all at the same time.

we shared stories, and secrets, and fantasies
the sun had already descended, and we were alone with each other,
the stars, the moon, and the world.
we passed those crazy looking gift shops, like the ones in “The Florida Project”. we passed a mosque. we passed lines and lines of trees.
when we finally reached the psychic, we were unhappy to discover she was charging $30. per person. per ten-minute reading. mind you, we were both in highschool and jobless. we found ourselves instead, sitting in a mcdonalds booth, with a ten-piece chicken nugget meal and an oreo mcflurry.

and that’s where it all began.
while we didn’t get the answers to our enigmatic futures, for the first time, i tasted what it meant to truly exist in the world. and for the first time, i learned what it meant to be connected to someone by a string of unspoken understanding.

for the first time, i felt complete.

as i packed up to go home the next morning, my body was filled with a gloomy satisfaction. “We are doing this next week!” either my best friend or I said. and sure enough, we spent the next two years chasing that same feeling, never to be echoed again.

while i have never been able to replicate the exact feeling i experienced that night, forget-me-nots never fail to sprout at the most peculiar of times

they’re uncreatable
they’re unpredictable

there’s an esoteric joy in their unconscious emergence.
you never know when a forget-me-not has decided to reveal itself
and establish a home in your heart

you can never plan for forget-me-not, although you can try.
through elaborately planned parties or finally getting the trip out of the group chat, you can seed the soil for them to sprout
but what really nurtures their growth is
unfathomable connection and solace

maybe they show up with a bottle of red wine and grainy crayola water paints, outlining the shapes that illuminate an internal spark
or maybe at four am with tears staining everyone’s fatigued bottom eyelids as you reveal parts of yourself you never thought could be related to
or maybe they show up when you sit alone outside, and let the ambience of the fresh atmosphere cleanse your soiled conscience

or maybe they can be found in times of great turmoil
when your hands are quaking, and your head is being held up by someone who engulfs you in advocacy

wherever they come from,
i grant forget-me-nots a special kind of gratitude
for sprinkling joy in wherever they grow
keeping this life a little less malevolent