Dr. Padmashree R P Poet Free verse

The Physics of Forgetting

Memory obeys laws we haven't written yet:
conservation of moments, entropy of joy,
the way certain scenes remain in perfect focus
while entire years blur into approximation.

Like light, it bends around massive objects
grief strong enough to warp the space around it,
so that walking through a doorway twenty years later
you emerge in a state that no longer exists.

Forgetting is not subtraction but transformation,
a change of state from solid to liquid to gas,
the way ice becomes water becomes vapour
still present, just harder to hold.

Scientists say nothing is truly lost,
only converted into different forms of energy.
So perhaps the birthday I can't quite remember,
the name that hovers at the edge of retrieval,

have simply changed frequency, moved beyond
the narrow band my brain can tune into,
still broadcasting somewhere in the spectrum,
still real, just inaccessible.

Or maybe forgetting is mercy in disguise
the mind's way of editing the rough cut,
removing the footage of ordinary happenings,
leaving only the scenes that mattered most.

But sometimes I wonder what's archived
in those deleted files: what casual afternoon,
what throwaway remark, what ordinary touch
might have been the thing worth keeping most.

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