You Threw the Thought Away. Your Brain Brought Him Back

Deciding that you are going to stop thinking about a man is one of those plans that sounds excellent until your brain hears about it.

You wake up, think of him immediately and decide this has gone on long enough. No more replaying conversations. No more wondering what he meant when he said that peculiar thing months ago. No more imagining what he is doing, who he is with or whether he ever thinks about you while standing in line for coffee.

Finished.

You mentally throw the whole subject as far away as possible and get on with your life.

Forty seconds later, your brain comes trotting back.

Look what I found.

Him.

Again.

This is especially irritating because you were quite clear the first time.

Your Brain Has Become Very Good at Fetch

At first, you assume the problem is that you have not thrown the thought far enough.

So you try again, this time with distractions. You start a film, clean something that did not particularly need cleaning, call a friend and eventually open an article about a subject so unrelated to romance that surely no man could possibly survive inside it. For a while, your brain disappears obediently and you think, Wonderful. We may finally have understood the assignment.

Then somewhere around paragraph four:

Do you think he really meant it when he said he needed space?

Oh, for heaven’s sake.

Back you go.

You throw the thought farther this time, possibly over a fence.

Your brain races after it with enormous enthusiasm.

Found him!

What makes this particularly absurd is that the thoughts are not always interesting. If your mind were producing astonishing new revelations, you might at least understand the enthusiasm, but quite often it comes trotting back with the same conversation, the same look, that message you have already considered from every conceivable direction, the afternoon when he seemed distant and the evening when he was wonderful.

One sentence in particular may have been examined from so many angles it ought to come with a rotating display stand.

You are not discovering anything. You are rerunning.

And yet every repetition arrives with the confidence of breaking news.

Repetition Has a Funny Way of Looking Important

After enough of this, a very tempting thought appears:

If I cannot stop thinking about him, he must mean something enormous.

Possibly.

But your mind also remembers advertising jingles from childhood and the embarrassing thing you said to a stranger twelve years ago, so perhaps we should not immediately hand it the keys to destiny.

Of course you may still love him, miss him or have feelings that have not quite packed up and left. But once he has appeared in your head for the forty-seventh time, repetition itself starts feeling more meaningful than it probably is.

A thought may come back because it matters, but after a while it also comes back because you thought about it yesterday. Then you notice that it keeps returning, wonder why it keeps returning and—excellent—you are now thinking about the fact that you are thinking about him.

We have achieved a thought about the thought.

The dog no longer needs you to throw anything.

It has found the cupboard.

Which is how a man can end up occupying an astonishing amount of your mind while doing absolutely nothing at all. He may be somewhere eating pasta, entirely unaware that three versions of a conversation involving him are currently playing in your head.

One of them has subtitles.

Eventually, the Game Gets Less Interesting

The peculiar thing is that these thought-loops rarely end with a grand announcement.

You do not wake up one morning, throw open the curtains and declare that your mind has officially completed its final screening of Him: The Director’s Cut.

It is usually much less glamorous. You think about him while making coffee and then, rather surprisingly, forget that you were thinking about him. Later he wanders through your mind again, except something else catches your attention before the scene really gets going. Eventually you notice that several hours have passed without him making an appearance, and after a while even that stops feeling noteworthy.

The thought still comes back occasionally, except now your brain seems to have lost some of its earlier excitement. It drops him at your feet, looks at you for a moment and discovers that neither of you is particularly interested in another round.

That may be the strangest part of all.

For a long time, his constant appearances can make it feel as though something enormous must still be going on. Then, rather inconveniently for the theory, nothing enormous happens at all. Your mind simply starts wandering back to him less often.

And the man who once occupied breakfast, the drive home, half the movie you were trying to watch and an unreasonable portion of your evening becomes, once again, one thought among many.

Not because every question was answered or because the past suddenly changed. Your brain just stopped bringing him back every time you threw him away.