The Unyielding Echo of Porcelain Throne
Yesterday, I found myself visiting my newly minted ex, N, and while navigating the ruins of our shared history, I couldn’t help but notice certain signs? They were glaringly prominent, vibrating with a heavy, symbolic weight they never would have possessed a month ago.
My mind immediately started acting as an unsolicited projectionist. Sort of like a three stage acts of a play.
Act I
First came a scene from Věra Chytilová’s Daisies - because naturally, the collapse of a relationship must mirror the chaotic absurdity of Czech New Wave cinema. One of our anarchic heroines declares, "I fear that I won’t ever see you again," as the man she thinks she desires walks away. But she was entirely wrong about her own intentionality. She didn’t actually desire him; she merely wanted to avoid the existential dread of being left alone. Sitting there, the realization hit me: we are functioning on the exact same psychological hardware. We constantly mistake the dread of our own internal void for the loss of a specific object.
We just deeply resent the void they leave in our phenomenal world. It is our innate ego preservation dressing itself up in tragic, indie-film dialogue. We want the comfort of the known variable, even when the equation is fundamentally broken.
Act II
Then, the mental reel switched to 500 Days of Summer - specifically, the infamous split-screen sequence of "Expectation" versus "Reality." What were my expectations stepping back into her orbit? What is the crushing reality? It is Jean-Paul Sartre’s genius concept of mauvaise foi (bad faith) rendered in painful high definition. We aggressively script an idealized projection of how an encounter will go to protect ourselves from the radical, nauseating reality of things as they actually are.
Act III
But the true philosophical climax occurred exactly where you’d expect: on her toilet. (And yes, I was sitting down, because fluid dynamics are a material reality and splashing is an objective moral failing - Diogenes the Cynic would highly respect the pure pragmatism of it). Affixed to the door was a list. Two maxims stood out with terrifying clarity:
- Happiness is okay, not guilty (even if others suffer)
- Get rid of bullshit
Let us unpack this little domestic manifesto. The first point is a rather aggressive stab at ethical egoism. Happiness is generally an acceptable pursuit, but the addendum - "even if others suffer" - transforms it from basic self-care into a bleak, Schopenhauerian zero-sum game. Does her self-actualization actively require my collateral damage? Is she finding her joy precisely in the space vacated by my inevitable, post-breakup suffering?
And then we arrive at the ultimate epistemological razor: "get rid of bullshit." In the grand ontological hierarchy of her newly curated life, one is forced to confront a terrifying hypothesis. To be reduced from a meaningful, complex partner to Harry Frankfurt’s literal definition of "bullshit" - an entity completely discarded for the sake of her new narrative - is quite the existential demotion.
There is something profoundly, quietly devastating about this realization. You spend weeks, months, maybe years, co-authoring a shared reality. You build a private lexicon, an intricate architecture of meaning, inside jokes, and vulnerabilities. You intertwine your existential dread with theirs. And when the lease is up, all of that profound metaphysical weight is flattened into a single, vulgar word on a bathroom door.
Am I the bullshit she is getting rid of?
I want to say yes - there's a certain tragic dignity in being someone's deliberate omission, a footnote important enough to require erasure. But the more honest, more humiliating possibility is that the note predates me entirely, that I am simply pattern-matching my own dread onto her handwriting, diagnosing bad faith in Act II while quietly practicing it myself in Act III.
Maybe the bullshit was never about me. Maybe I am just very skilled at making myself the subject of sentences that were never written with me in mind.
I flushed, washed my hands, and rejoined with her - unsure whether I'd just read an epitaph or a grocery list.