What hurts more?

There is a song I listen to from time to time. Its hook line says "can you tell me what hurts more, is it remembering or forgetting?"

I've thought about that question a lot lately. I don't know who wrote the song, or what they were remembering and forgetting but I understand the complexity of the question.

The pain of remembering is sharp, deep, and sudden. Old wounds can fillet open with just one thought, and I am back in a battle that I'm not sure I'll survive. As one thought leads to another, the dam breaks, and I begin to drown in the blood of invisible injuries that are decades old.

But the ache of forgetting is just as unbearable. At first it's a relief, and a pause from the war. But as time goes on the ache of forgetting burns like magma inside. Life becomes tasteless, hollow and vain. The hole left inside me is a vacuum that cannot be satiated. All the things that I am, that I have been; become meaningless and I soon feel that life itself isn't worth the struggle.