I’ve been thinking about what happens when you have to deal with one of life’s big traumas. It’s all about filing stuff away: Putting people and experiences in their mental cubby-holes and file folders, calling it just another sad episode in the story of your life, and then tidying up and moving on. The trick is just figuring out where to file things.

The problem is when, after much denial and forbearance and perseverance, you come to accept the unfortunate fact that the one person you trusted above all others is actually an irredeemable piece of shit that deserves no place in your life whatsoever-not even in a cubby-hole.

After all, what do you do with shit? You don’t put it in a box so you can take it out and look at it on a rainy day, or put it in a file cabinet so you can reference it quickly. You flush it down the toilet.

Now the mind’s toilet is a tricky device. The psychological plumbing is of third-world caliber. You can put this piece of shit where it belongs and you can flush and flush, but man, that stuff just won’t go down! And even when it finally does, you never have a whole lot of confidence that it won’t bubble up again and stink up your life at the worst possible moment.