where do thoughts go when we forget them?

a contemplation on the world's least-questioned vanishing act

Some thoughts feel like soap bubbles - effervescent, fragile, gone before you ever get to marvel at them or catalogue them. For a moment, they exist, floating in perfect clarity, and then pop, the void reclaims them. They slip through the cracks of awareness so easily, no matter how tightly you try to capture them. Sometimes they feel like whispers just out of earshot, tantalising in their nearness; and it is in these moments I have the odd yearning for an ear as elastic and extendable as they had in the cartoons I used to watch as a child. I’ve lost more thoughts than I’ve kept, I’m sure of it. It always seems to happen at the worst times, when I’m mid-sentence writing an essay, thinking of the perfect follow-up statement, but its gone by the time I’ve hit the full-stop. They come and go so fast - and yet the ones that escape always feel the most important: the clever retort I’ll never deliver, the solution to a problem I can’t quite recall, a quote from a book I can only vaguely envision the cover of.

I like to imagine that there is a celestial library, out in the cosmos, where these lost thoughts are catalogued. A book of forgotten dreams, a drawer of misplaced to-do lists, a special wing for the shower epiphanies written down only in the steam on the glass. Perhaps those thoughts don’t vanish - they’re just waiting to be checked out again, simply filed away until we are ready to remember. Maybe there’s even a librarian carefully tucking each idea into its place. She walks down the aisles, humming a tune no one can quite remember the name of, tending to fragile fragments of thought. It’s comforting to think that nothing is ever truly gone. Forgotten? Yes. Misplaced? Often. But lost? Perhaps not.

Of course, not all forgotten thoughts are profound - how could they be? Some are mundane, groceries or names of actors. But even those seem to hold a strange weight. It’s not the thought itself I miss the most, it’s the thread it was connected to, the bigger picture it had the opportunity to be part of. Forgetting feels, at times, like pulling this thread and watching in horror as the whole sweater begins to unravel. But most of all, it makes me think what else I’ve let slip away.

Yet, there’s something freeing about forgetting too. I wonder if it is less about loss and more about movement, evolution - the way a river reshapes the land it flows through, carving new paths while leaving traces of its old course behind.¹ Perhaps the yarn from the sweater is knitted into something warmer, softer, something that fits just a little closer to the skin.

So where do thoughts go when we forget them? Maybe they go everywhere, scatter like seeds, waiting for the right conditions to bloom. Or maybe they go nowhere at all, waiting on the horizon. And maybe that’s enough - to trust that the truly important ones will make it back to you given time. After all, some things aren’t meant to be remembered. Their transient, fleeting nature may be what gives them value.

And if those thoughts do exist somewhere, I like to think they’re happy there, well taken care of. Floating gently through nothingness, glistening for anyone who dares to look up.

in all honesty, this scene from inside out was playing nonstop in my head when imagining how thoughts would look in the ether

1. the oxbow lake to straight-course enigma from geography gcse that time cannot seem to wipe from my memory