As a woman, have you ever been lying in bed, trying to find any shred of will possible to get out of it and go forth with your day, only to have your thoughts suddenly be led astray to the one who abandoned or jilted you? Have you ever wondered if, at that very same moment, he might be thinking about you too? And if he is thinking about you in that same moment, are the two of you inextricably bound by some cosmic connection that can’t be thwarted by the mistakes and aches of the past? Maybe so, you like to tell yourself. You compare it to that concluding scene in Shopgirl, where Steve Martin narrates, “And some nights alone, she thinks of him. Some nights, these thoughts occur at the same moment. And Ray and Mirabelle are connected without ever knowing it.”

But, as reality should have conditioned you to apprehend by now, life is not like a movie. Least of all one starring Claire Danes, who always manages to finagle the most attractivo of men for someone as plain as she. So did it ever cross your mind that while you’re reminiscing about some special memory you and your ex had, like banging in a bed and breakfast in Vermont or hiding playfully from one another amid Gaudi architecture in Spain, that he’s probably just farting. He’s literally just sitting or standing somewhere not thinking about you at all, instead casually performing the daily acts mandated by the essential functions of the body. He could be waiting in line to buy condoms for the next victim he hopes to make believe he loves or he could be posted up in a coffee shop trolling the internet for information that will make his next victim believe he is learned and far more intelligent than the average male.

He could be doing so many things, but I’ll tell you what he’s not doing: thinking about you while you do the same of him. No, no, at this point, he has Alzheimer’s regarding any of the time you might have spent together. That’s so far in the past to him that it feels like it might have been another lifetime. He has other concerns now, and none of them pertain to conjecturing about how deteriorated your mental health might be from loss of love and loss of faith in love. He is zipping about the proverbial cabin in a stupor of oblivion. Oblivion to the fact that all your thoughts and energies are concentrated on him. Not necessarily getting him back, but on whether or not his level of suffering is equitable to yours according to the transitive property. But, as with all things related to math, this formula is bullshit and will serve you no purpose. Because if “a” is your agony and equals “b,” the constancy with which you think about him, and “b”  equals “c,” your perpetual non-will to live (as demarcated by your total lack of interest in sex as of late), it doesn’t seem to add up to the final result: his blissful ignorance to the anguish caused by the dissolution of the heart.

But you keep lying there in the bed that feels like it should be in an insane asylum amid a row of other cots, dreaming your little dreams and having your little fantasies over the notion that he might be wistfully musing over the times you had together–just as you are in this instant–times that can never be replaced or duplicated no matter how hard you try to do so with another person. You will never face up to the very real probability (there math is again, fucking you over) that he is, in actuality, farting. One endless stream that pays homage to how he obviously feels about you.