I’ve realized this by just watching myself over the years; when a person’s trust is taken away, when a wound is inflicted, it can never fully heal. Your trust will never return to what it once was, and the wound will never completely mend. The human brain is a strange thing.

That’s why people distance themselves from those individuals forever, growing cold toward them. It’s as if they no longer exist. Remembering them reopens the wound and brings back the memory of their actions—the very actions that destroyed that trust.

And that’s why, at some point, you truly forget those people. Not pretending, not faking it—truly, they vanish from your mind forever.

At some point, they stop mattering to you, and you don’t even recall them. Only every few months, or maybe once a year, do they pop into your mind, and you say, Oh, these used to take up a part of my mind for a while.