Should I Call Him?
A breakup, a mausoleum, and a loom
By Taylor Zimmerman
Collage by Austin Hughes
“I looked at his Instagram again.” Simon sits on the edge of the couch, his hand resting on his chin, his gaze fixed on the door. His legs are crossed; his body angled away from me. “I miss him so much. I just don’t know how he can be so happy while I’m so miserable.” Pain flashes across Simon’s face as he begins to sob. I sit across from him, my hands folded in my lap, listening quietly. This is a familiar story—one I have heard from Simon many times and from others whose grief has been woven into his. The room goes still; the only sound is the ticking of a clock. After a moment, he speaks. “How could I be so foolish? Why can’t I just move on?”
“I am stuck in a graveyard,” I tell my analyst. I feel the well-worn bolster pillow beneath my head as I stare at the ceiling. Behind me, I hear the familiar sound of a pen scratching against a memo pad as well as an occasional hum to encourage me to keep talking. “There are no fences or gates, just a thick fog on the perimeter. I walk around numerous flat headstones to get to the center where several mausoleums loom. Each one is dedicated to a once-important relationship that has been dead for some time. I maintain the graveyard and polish the granite over and over again. I am stuck here, alone, a fool refusing to acknowledge death but unable to imagine anything different.” My words hang in the air. I can hear the clock ticking behind me. A few minutes pass. I sigh. “How am I supposed to help Simon do something I am unable to do?”
**
In his essay Mourning and Melancholia, Freud unpacks why it is so difficult for a person to move on after a loss. Mourning, Freud tells us, is a “normal affect” in response to the loss of someone we loved. It is a painful form of reality testing where we realize that the thing or person or experience we loved is no longer there. Looking at an old photograph, resetting a Netflix password, or getting into an empty bed are all recognitions, however painful, that the relationship we once had is gone. For Freud, mourning resolves itself after a certain period of time. Attempting to interfere with the process is useless. Sorrow and pain run their course. We move on. We learn to love someone else.
Melancholia, however, is what happens when a loss involves intense ambivalence—when the love we felt for someone was mixed with anger, resentment, and contempt and the loss itself feels like a wound to our ego. Rather than working through the loss and eventually loving someone else, we get stuck. Our anger toward the other person is turned inward as we lash out against our own egos, even as we go on idealizing the relationship. We keep the relationship alive in our minds long after it is dead, not through a fond recollection but through repeated self-reproaches. Every return to a text message thread, photo album, or social media profile and the accompanying attempts to rehash where the relationship went wrong are, while painful, denials of reality. The relationship is gone. The task for the melancholic is to untangle this internal conflict so that mourning can do its proper work.
While Freud draws a clear distinction between mourning, which is normal, and melancholia, which is not, is there really such a thing as an uncomplicated mourning? As Jean Laplanche asks, “Where are we to find mourning which would be only conscious, with no infantile reverberation, no ambivalence and no narcissistic consequences?” Perhaps there is no mourning entirely free of melancholia’s residue. Freud does not draw such a sharp distinction a year prior in an essay titled “On Transience,” where he observes that our minds cling to their objects even after they are lost and even when a substitute lies ready to hand. This, too, he calls mourning. In other words, the inability to move on, even when another relationship is available, may, in fact, be intrinsic to mourning.
**
Why then the repeated return? With breakups, the inability to move on might have less to do with loss than with desire. The mausoleum, after all, is a trick, a tomb to one still alive, and, because still alive, one capable of change. When Simon returns to his former partner’s Instagram, he is not simply mourning. He is searching for evidence, interpreting curated photos for some sign that the person he loved is still in there, still reachable, still capable of loving him back. In a breakup, desire slams against the limits of the sensible. What if he has changed? What if he regrets how things ended? What if he is finally capable of loving me in all the ways I want to be loved? Desire promises a higher, truer love just within reach, but if that hope is tested and fails, he falls much further for having climbed so high.
For certain types of breakup, desire can contribute to even more devastating consequences. In the television series The Good Place, Eleanor Shellstrop reunites with her mother after years of estrangement only to resist believing her mother has turned her life around. Eleanor is confronted by her friend Michael who asks her why, if she herself can change, does she not believe her own mother can. Eleanor’s response is heart-wrenching: “If Donna Shellstrop has truly changed, then that means she was always capable of change, but I just wasn’t worth changing for.” This is the monkey’s-paw logic of desire. The wish for a former partner to be better can mean better without you. This is what keeps one polishing the granite—not the recognition that things were once good, but the hope that they could still be good and the terror of finding out they already are, just with someone else.
Desire need not always be tested; it could be denied. In Remedies for Love, Ovid advises jilted lovers to fixate on their ex’s faults: the crooked teeth, the awkward walk, the grating laugh. An ex who once appeared to have beauty which rivaled the gods is revealed to be simply human—flawed, forgettable, and, most importantly, replaceable. Through this deliberate act, the melancholic can hasten mourning. However, this, too, has its limits, and anyone who has ever sought comfort from friends during a breakup knows them all too well. “You were too good for him anyway,” “I never actually liked him,” and “You can do way better” are consolations that land less like sage wisdom than the miserable comfort of Job’s friends. Ovid’s deliberate disenchantment is a double-edged sword. If Simon’s ex was so inconsiderate, so vile, and so unworthy of the grief Simon has been carrying for months, what does that say about Simon? When we devalue the one we loved, we devalue ourselves for having loved them.
**
Desire is perhaps destined always to be unruly. As the psychoanalytic patient knows all too well, desire is not so easily satisfied, modified, or ignored. Partly, this is because we often don’t know what we actually want. In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud likens desire to the Titans of Greek mythology, defeated by the gods but not destroyed, pinned under the mountains, sending tremors through the earth above them. It lies in wait ready to ally itself with a conscious impulse and ready to transfer its great seismic intensity to it. Impulses to check stories and snaps, to “casually” bring up a name in conversation, to destroy letters and block socials, to hook up with strangers, to reach out to an ex’s family member, to buy a gift and mail it, to call up an ex, or to post song lyrics over a photo of a sunset are conscious impulses with the heft of the unconscious behind them.
One of psychoanalysis’s most enduring insights is that unconscious desire does not emerge from nowhere. In the very beginning, it takes shape in relation to another person—the first other, the caretaking adult who wants things from us we cannot understand. Because of this, what ends up feeling most intimate is always already external, alien, and other. We do not invent our longing. It is given to us and called out of us. Our conscious lives are filled with ordinary impulses: the project to finish, the promotion to earn, the language to pick up, the habit to break. But, underneath it all, and older than any of it, is something simpler and harder to satisfy—we long to be seen, known, and loved. When Simon sits on the edge of the couch, staring at the door, body turned away from me, returning again and again to the topic of his ex, this fundamental relationship to the other is what he is orbiting.
But desire is not just an echo of the past. It is also, and perhaps more powerfully, a vision of what is not yet here. When we desire, we do not see things as they are but rather as what they could be—not a fulfillment but a promise, arousing expectation rather than diminishing it. In The Ethics of Time, philosopher John Manoussakis argues that the human mind is drawn toward the perfect and the complete. When reality falls short—and it always does—the mind fills in the rest, through memory and anticipation, bestowing on the one it loves a wholeness they do not yet possess.
On one hand, this means that we do not remember our former partners as they were. We remember them often as they almost were or could have been. Much of the pain of a breakup involves the loss of possibility. Simon mourns that his ex could not be the partner that he desired him to be. On the other hand, our desires point to a still future possibility. Love for another is not so easily negated in a breakup. Desire reminds us that even in our greatest pains and disappointments, we cannot help but hold an image of who our former lover could be, no matter how angry we are with ourselves for holding out that hope.
**
The melancholic, then, is in a holding pattern. What appears to be a compulsion to repeat is an experience of waiting. What keeps Simon on the hook is not his refusal to mourn but his inability to negate his own desire. He is unable to possess that which he so deeply longs for—love from his ex-partner—but also unable to stop desiring it. His desire relentlessly drives him forward to a possibility that always feels on the horizon but is never reached. The melancholic waits or, rather, is forced into waiting—not passively but restlessly, unable to leave this tension but pained in staying.
Waiting may not be the first description that comes to mind in a breakup, but it captures what happens when relentless desire confronts the immutability of time. Using the image of a lump of sugar dissolving in a glass of water, the French philosopher Henri Bergson describes the experience of waiting. “No matter what I do,” Bergson writes, “I still must wait for the sugar to dissolve.” In waiting, we recognize that time “can be neither lengthened nor shortened at will. It is no longer something thought; it is something lived.”
Time cannot be hurried, but that does not stop us from trying. The acts of pacing, fidgeting, and handwringing are all attempts to bargain with the clock. Agitation and ambivalence rule over us when we wait. We fight against time, stomping our feet in protest; we sigh and surrender to it. Like a tide, awareness of the clock ebbs and flows. In a breakup, time is, at first, agonizingly slow. Simon refreshes his DMs, checks and rechecks his texts, pores over read receipts, shared locations, and his memories and fantasies about his ex’s schedule. And then, time lurches to breakneck speed. He sees his ex in a photo with someone else and can’t fathom how he could move on so quickly. He shouts, he cries, he distracts himself. And then he’s dragged back into time at the next reminder of his grief—time that once again crawls achingly slow.
“When we devalue the one we loved, we devalue ourselves for having loved them.”
When the clock cannot be bargained with, the mind tries to see past it. We imagine that the past, present, and future could, as Bergson writes, “be unfolded all at once and fully spread out like a fan.” But this is not how life works. Its meaning unfolds gradually, like a song or a story, showing itself through time and only understood in time. We seek understanding in breakups, but particular moments can take on universal meaning prematurely, attempting to seize a meaning today that must be reserved for tomorrow. Simon might ruminate over memories, read about attachment styles, watch long-form YouTube content about dating and breaking up—he might even pull out the DSM—all in an attempt to understand and put his relationship to bed. But one snapshot does not make the whole.
When neither hurrying nor understanding works, what is left is distraction and even that fails. The philosopher Jean-Luc Marion describes moments when the world appears to have emptied itself of meaning—when our handwringing and pacing fail to hasten our wait—and we are forced to ask, “Does anyone love me?” In asking, Marion argues, we do not know who we are but we know where we are, waiting to discover if we are affected by anyone at all. It is a crisis from which we cannot pull ourselves away. Those who have loved and lost know this moment late at night, lying awake, wondering if they are too old, too broken, too far gone for anyone to love—if, perhaps, they are out of time. Should I call him?—a final cry against the thick fog on the perimeter of the cemetery.
And what if that thing we are waiting for never comes? In Samuel Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot, two men wait through two acts for a man who never arrives. At the end of each act, a messenger enters to tell them that Godot will not be arriving that evening but will “surely” arrive the next day. In both cases, the men resolve to leave, only to remain exactly where they are.
At this point, waiting might feel like a purgatory with no exit, a place of repetition where every attempt at resolution leads to a dead end. Perhaps waiting even feels like a graveyard.
Yet, waiting need not be passive. The character of Penelope in Homer’s Odyssey captures what can be generative in waiting. In the epic, when Odysseus is believed to be dead, his wife Penelope is beset with suitors who urge her to give up on her missing husband and marry one of them. Being loyal to Odysseus, Penelope wants to wait for his return but knows she must do something to keep her suitors at bay. She tells them that she cannot remarry until she finishes weaving a shroud for her father-in-law Laertes. During the day, Penelope weaves on her loom, but then at night, when the household has gone to sleep, she unravels her work by torchlight. She continues this for years, weaving during the day and unraveling at night.
While some psychoanalysts have used the story of Penelope to describe a pathological compulsion to repeat, Laplanche argues that this is Penelope’s act of mourning. He writes:
But Penelope does not cut the threads, as in the Freudian theory of mourning; she patiently unpicks them, to be able to compose them again in a different way. Moreover, this work is nocturnal, far from the conscious lucidity with which, Freud claims, the threads are broken one by one. This work requires time, it is repetitive …There is, however, a possible end. One can imagine that one evening the new cloth, for a while at least, will not be unwoven.
Mourning takes repetition, emotional work, and, most importantly, time. Penelope does not leave the loom nor does she stop weaving. She unravels the same threads night after night, not to escape the work but to keep the possibility open that the shroud could change. Her work is not done for herself alone. The weaving, ostensibly for Laertes, keeps the suitors at bay; the unweaving, night after night, is done for the sake of Odysseus. This, too, is the work of psychoanalysis—though here, the other is in the room. When a patient lies on the couch, following the threads of associations, and the analyst helps to unravel, disentangle, and unbind those associations, a patient can work through painful suffering and, in time, gain a new way of relating to herself and her world.
**
For Simon, waiting is not about doubling down on his own patience with the hopes of getting together again with his ex nor is it about gritting his teeth and enduring his own pain as if it will just resolve itself in time. Waiting allows all the painful parts of Simon’s mind—all the existential unravelings, distorted misperceptions, and cries too deep for words—to emerge and circulate within the room, and, perhaps most importantly, with another mind. In my own reverie, I was alone in a graveyard. When I saw that Simon was in the same predicament, I had imagined my task was to help him leave his graveyard and cut his losses, to do something I could not.
Somewhere in my work with him, he ceased to be Simon, a flesh-and-bone patient. He became “the melancholic,” an emblem, a double for my own stuckness. But what I overlooked was the other mind in my analyst’s room, a witness waiting with me as I paced around the headstones. His presence helped me see that I could offer Simon not a way out, but the same companionship in uncertainty. It is not my task to force Simon to move on, but rather I am to wait with him, even when no end is on the horizon.
Polishing the granite of a mausoleum and unweaving a shroud are not that different. Simon will likely look at his ex’s Instagram again after our session and most likely several more times after that. After all, it is a conscious impulse with unconscious heft behind it. He will no doubt have more painful experiences ahead of him where he wrestles with the fallout of this important relationship. But he brings his longing to me, again and again, session after session. This is what separates the shroud from the granite—not the repetition, but that it unbinds a pattern so that it can be remade with another. Something in how he talks about it with me next time might be different. He might focus not on the compulsion but more on the shape of his desire—a thread pulled but not cut, unraveled with another so that it might be rewoven.
Back in the office, Simon and I sit together in silence. The clock ticks away.
Taylor Zimmerman is a psychoanalytic psychotherapist in private practice in Lexington, Kentucky. He holds graduate degrees in philosophy of religion and theology, is a candidate at the Chicago Psychoanalytic Institute, and serves on the leadership of the Lexington Psychoanalytic Study Group.
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Published September 2026