Forgotten Remarkable Things

About a month ago, I wrote a post about perceived values and how skewed they sometimes are. Basically, it was about love and how we often like to think we're living with wild horses, when in fact, we're living nothing special.
And I've been thinking about that again. Not particularly about wild horses, but about heartache. About how anything at a certain moment in time seems gigantic and painful, something we'll never get over, of course. But then, like it or not, time passes and it forces you to let go of what happened. Or not. Again, some people choose to remain under the spell of the past for far too long.
But usually, life forces you to move on, whether it was a break-up that screwed you up, an untimely death or a horrendous betrayal, life goes on and you must go with it. Even if it was a wild-horses sort of moment, time doesn't really care about that and it will not stand still for you to grieve. It will insist that you find food and slowly pull out of your imposed darkness. And the darkness will fade, even though at one point, it seemed like it never would.
Everything is relative, as the famous formula goes.
And that includes pain. And love. And sadness. And joy. Everything.

_{Photo by Mads Schmidt Rasmussen on Unsplash}

It seems so sad, to think that every bit of what makes a life is largely insignificant, in the larger scheme of things. You'll run into people everyday who have no idea how colossally broken your heart is. And you, in turn, won't know about their troubles. And in a few dozen years - very brief time - no one will remember you at all, or the things that broke your heart or shook you to the bone. I guess this relates, in a way, to a book I read recently, one I enjoyed a great deal, called 'If nobody speaks of remarkable things' by Jon McGregor and it posed this great question

He says, if nobody speaks of remarkable things, how can they be called remarkable?

And the answer is they can, as far as I can see it, they are. Forgotten remarkable things. And that's why people have to sing songs and tell stories, to remember remarkable things. And they probably won't make a ballad about you or even a short story and that's tragic. But maybe that's what these so called artists do, they're just scribes who're in charge of remembering you. It's not your story, you Joe, and yet it is. It's a story you know well and which you can readily endow with your own particularities. You alone will know she had brown hair and not gold, but your name and sorrow will be carried in those words, along with thousands of others.

Really, do you ever stop to think that every song you hear and every story you read is haunted? That it's interwoven with the tales of so many forgotten ghosts? And that, even in the stories you yourself create, there are voices not your own...

It seems both frightful and charming to me...