Why do the cases I can't close follow me home?

You know the night. You're at the kitchen table, or still in the truck in your own driveway, engine off, lights off. It's past midnight. You're not thinking about work — work is just there, running, like a tape that never got turned off. A face. A detail you noticed and can't unnotice. The thing you should have said to the family, or the thing you did say and now can't stop hearing yourself say it. This is not weakness and it is not unusual. You were trained to notice everything and finish nothing — most cases don't end, they just stop being yours. No one trained you how to put that down. So your mind does the only thing it knows: it keeps working the case, alone, at an hour when there is no case to work. Here is what is true and what is not. You cannot choose to care less. That part of you did its job tonight and every night — it is not the problem. What you can choose is what happens to the thought when it returns. Not whether it returns. What you do the moment it does.