Forget Me Not

Gaslight, gatekeep, girlboss

Boys loved to forget about you, but hated finding out they were just as easily forgettable.

You learned this very early in your life, one of the many lessons your older sisters had passed on to you. You were barely a teenager back then but you remembered as if it was just yesterday, the memory of your sister Jane, with her glorious cocktail of middle child anger and a borderline anarchical emotional stance, placing her ringing phone in the freezer. Although you did not ask, she said "He ghosted me for like a week".

"That does not explain the IPhonesicle you just made" you told her.

Jane shrugged "I texted his best friend and he did not like that" the noise kept coming from the refrigerator, muffled but still shrill "men do not like when you treat them the same way they treat you" she hummed, as if she had not just dropped a pearl of wisdom in your marker stained hands "go figure."

At that time, you didn't think much of it. You kept those words in the back pocket of your mind, not knowing then how much they would resonate in the future

There were many other things that your sisters said that subconsciously stuck with you - people say that older siblings are the blueprint and they couldn't be more right. If Jane and Lizzie were blueprints, you were the unhinged engineer that took those plans and ran with it and whatever those two did it was guaranteed that you would take it to an unwarranted level. Your first heartbreak proved it true.

You were just sixteen and he was older, the perfect recipe for disaster. He filled your head with rehearsed lies about how mature you were for your age and how you were not like the other girls (he was right, you were worse). It was all fine and well and you basked in your ingenue stupidity up until you saw him in a deep examination of a senior cheerleader's tongue at a random house party.

Oh, that tore you apart, the pain setting its claws deep in your heart. Hearing for so long how different you were made the realization of how replaceable you actually were to the male gaze much more hurtful. You climbed into Lizzie's bed that night with mascara running down your face from all the crying you did, a couple of chocolate bars on one hand and hatred on the other. Lizzie - the oldest, less prone to dramatic affairs, much more prone to dangerous ones - listened quietly, as she always did. In the end, she cleaned your face with a makeup wipe, poured you a tiny glass of your mom's wine that you should not be drinking and said "You are not replaceable and you are not stupid. You are young" she sipped from her own glass, much fuller than yours "Don't think of that man as your ex. Think of him as a lesson learn. A mistake not to be repeated."

At that age, sometimes your sisters seemed bigger than life. Sometimes it felt like they had been through everything and carried all the answers forward - it would be stupid not to listen to the life's cheat sheet they carried.

So when Lizzie finished her night of advice (a rare occurrence, those nights, as Lizzie was not a talker) with the next few words, you listened and made them your own. "Remember, Y/N" she said "in this house, we do not forgive. Sometimes we forget. If someone reminds you, make them wish they didn't".

The next day, when your human shaped lesson of an ex showed up to your school to see you, your heart filled you with an overflowing amount of anger, threatening to drip from your eyes. He came up to you as if nothing had happened and the sight of him made you feel just as bad as when you saw him with that cheerleader - replaceable, forgettable. Frozen in your place, you didn't move as he kissed your face. His touch made you feel sick and you wished you could erase the memory of it from your mind.

As if you had an epiphany or a spontaneous acid trip, your mind conjured collections of your sisters' words and actions, mixing the things they taught and the things you watched them do for years. Elizabeth had told you to forget sometimes, but never forgive. Jane had told you how much reciprocity could be a bitch. Your spiralling psyche combined both of those motivational quotes into your own, that you did not know then would dictate the tone of all your convoluted breakups.

If someone made you feel as if you were easily forgettable, then you would easily forget them.

And you, being you, took that quite literally. That day you looked straight into your ex-boyfriend's eyes and with an unflinching, stone cold face said "I'm sorry, do we know each other?"

Oh, that made him mad. After the initial confusion, he made a fuss and called you every name in the book. Everytime you assured him he never met you before he would call you crazy while having no idea of how right he was. But you kept your lie with your head held high, putting all the acting skills you had mastered in your years as the youngest sister to good use. And it just so happened that destiny and his lack of principles were on your side because in all the months you were a couple, you hadn't told anyone. He spewed shit about how your love was a secret that it would be better kept, that people wouldn't understand and would be way too jealous, that you didn't have to prove your feelings to anyone. Of course you figured out that all those words were just his way of keeping himself single but at that moment those words were his demise.

And so he walked away and you added a new strategy to your playbook of how to make men lose their shit.
And it worked perfectly fine until you girlbossed a bit too close to the sun.

And the sun's name was Jeon Jungkook