𝗟𝗜𝗧𝗘𝗥𝗔𝗥𝗬: “What the Mind Erases, the Heart Keeps” by Micaella Villanueva

Published by: Francen Anne Perez

Date Published: August 15, 2025

Time Published: 10:50 AM 

Category: Prose

Subject: The Limits of Forgetting 

You can erase someone from your mind. 

There are ways—quiet, methodical, almost sterile. You delete the pictures. You rename the memories into vague blurs, soften the details until they no longer feel like bruises. You throw away the things they touched, not for their worth, but for the worth of the person who once did. You stop going to the places you once claimed together. You rewrite routines. You start saying convictions that fool even you.

And at first, it starts to work.

The pain doesn’t claw so loudly. You no longer flinch when their name comes up in conversation. Their voice fades to static in your head. Like a dream you swear you’ll remember, but never did. Like a room that once held something sacred, now emptied and swept clean.

But then—there’s the heart.

The heart is where science fails.

Because love isn’t data. It isn’t a line of memory to be highlighted and erased. It’s a presence that lingers in your bones, in muscle memory, in the pauses between songs. In the words you unconsciously echo. In the movies you still avoid. In the orange you still peel a certain way—because they once told you that’s how they liked it.

I hate that the ending wasn’t big enough to match everything that came before it. I hate that all that’s left now is this piece—born from the aftermath, written in the wreckage. Words scrawled with questions that will never be answered. With flashbacks I didn’t ask to keep. With imaginary scenes I visit when the world goes quiet.

I’m still writing.

Not because I want to remember—

But because I can’t seem to forget.

You can pay to have someone removed from your head, but they’ll always survive in the places you didn’t know they touched.

In the gaps between thoughts.

In the scent of a season.

In the odd comfort of heartbreak that somehow still feels like home.

Some days, I lie and say I’m better.

Other days, I write like you’re still reading.

Not out of hope—

But out of grief.

Because forgetting with the mind is clean.

Forgetting with the heart is violent.

It’s slow.

And aching.

And painfully unfinished.

And some of us are still trying.

Still erasing,

Still remembering,

Still writing.