T H E P R O C E D U R E

There is a procedure. That’s where the story begins. Not with love, not with loss, but with a clinic, a medical file, and a technician who maps your brain the way you’d map a hard drive, looking for the specific files he needs to delete. In Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, a company called Lacuna Inc. offers a service: if someone has caused you enough pain, if the grief of them is more than you can carry, they will go in and remove every memory you have of that person. Not therapy. Not time. Erasure. You go to sleep, they do the work, and you wake up clean. The person who broke you is gone from you entirely, like they never existed, like you never chose them, like none of it ever happened. Doesn’t that sound like a dream ? We can all erase our trauma and just erase it ? But doesn’t our body still remember what we went through with each other ?

Joel did it because Clementine did it first. She’d had him removed from her mind and he found out and he couldn’t bear it, so he signed the forms too. He went home, went to sleep, and let them take her. Except midway through the procedure, somewhere in the architecture of his own unconscious, he changed his mind. He started running. Moving her through memories she’d never been part of, trying to hide her somewhere the machine couldn’t reach. A childhood moment. A humiliation. Anywhere. He was trying to save her inside himself while the clinic methodically took her apart. And in his last remaining memory of her, before they got to it too, she leaned close and whispered: meet me in Montauk.

He forgot her. She had already forgotten him. And then, without knowing why, they both ended up in Montauk. Almost like fate had a funny way of bringing back together people that don’t wanna know about each other. God has a funny way of making things happen that’s for sure.

Ariana Grande understood what that feels like. In 2024 she named her entire album after this film, which is one of the braver things a pop artist has done in recent memory. To say openly: this is the movie that told the truth about something I lived through. The lead single, we can’t be friends, is built around exactly that emotional logic, the moment you realize the only way to survive someone is to cut the line completely, to stop waiting for them to become who you needed them to be. The music video pulls directly from Gondry’s imagery. She wasn’t being subtle. She was being precise.

Both the film and the album circle the same unanswerable question: does it work? And the answer the film gives you is the most honest one it could. It works perfectly. And it changes nothing that matters. Because whatever it was that pulled Joel and Clementine toward each other didn’t live only in the memories. It lived underneath them, in something that can’t be mapped or filed or deleted. They found each other again as strangers. And standing in the snow at the end, knowing everything, knowing they’d already failed at this once, they chose each other anyway. Even after all the hurt and damage they had done to each other they still wanted to be together. How fucked up, toxic, and kinda romantic ?

The last line Joel says to a memory of Clementine, as it dissolves around him, is: please let me keep this memory. Just this one. Just her. And the machine takes it anyway.

I think about that line more than I probably should. Because here is the thing that fascinates me and unsettles me in equal measure: this technology, or something like it, is not as far away as it once seemed. There is real neuroscience being done right now on memory reconsolidation, on the possibility of weakening or altering specific memories through targeted intervention. It is not yet Lacuna Inc. But it is moving in that direction. And I find that genuinely fascinating in a way I can’t entirely explain, because part of me, if I’m being honest, would use it.

Not for heartbreak necessarily. For the other thing. For the specific memories of what people did to you, not the people you loved and lost but the ones who hurt you on purpose, who looked you in the eye and chose to cause damage, who left marks you still find sometimes when you’re not expecting to. The ones that live in your body as much as your mind. The ones that changed how you move through a room, how much you trust, how quickly you flinch. If I could go in and take those out, cleanly, and wake up without them, would I?

Probably. And I think most people, if they’re being honest with themselves, would say the same.

But then again. The damage is also the data. It’s how you learned what you learned. It’s the reason you recognize certain things now before they have a chance to hurt you again. You cannot always separate the wound from the wisdom it eventually became.

So maybe you hold onto it. Maybe you let the machine pass over it and you carry it forward, heavier than you’d like, more present than seems fair.

At the end of the day you make that choice and you make peace with it, or you try to, because you are only human. And being human means carrying the full weight of everything that happened to you, the beautiful parts and the brutal ones, and getting up anyway, and going back out into the world, and sometimes, against all reasonable evidence, choosing to love something again.

“Please let me just keep this memory, just this one.”