Dasein flees from its existence in anguish.
She had been repeating this sentence in her head since she left that classroom on Thursday at 4 pm. In 24 hours she would experience overwhelming frustration from a broken sink and a pile of dirty dishes, the pain killer she indulged herself with due to the insufferable toothache caused by her unextracted wisdom teeth, and finally a piece of bacon with ants feasting on it, lying on the floor of the French patisserie with beige wooden showcase, generous sunlight, and delicious almond croissants.
If she had glimpsed her existence then it is full of disappointment. Or she hadn’t yet. What she had seen about her life was disappointing, but nothing more than the drudgery. Although she also did not flee. She simply could not escape.
Something relieving, if not positive, did happen to her within that 24 hours. The girl that she had been in a prolonged intellectual rivalry with finally decided that she was not a threat to her at all. Surely, she couldn’t read French or Latin, and her German was terrible. She did read Chinese but China has no continental philosophy. How could she ever rival against her?
It did not matter if the girl was going to be a historian of logic and of anti-psychologism and getting her Ph.D. at Columbia or UPenn. The only thing she cared about was to get through that pile of dishes sitting in that broken sink.
Did the girl notice that piece of bacon? It entertained her a great deal knowing that both the girl and the bacon were bathed in the same crispy winter sunlight. But of course, the girl looked beautiful as always — that piece of bacon could not taint her existence to the slightest. Meanwhile, her situation was different. Her toothache came in waves, overthrowing her as if it was pulling a rug under her feet every five minutes. The ants seemed to be crawling in her mouth as that piece of bacon gradually losing its greasy, distorted shape. So now she had a taste of bacon in her mouth as well.
She wondered if she was performing a certain task in order to exist. If that was the case, then she would feel much better about her current situation. Because then she knew for sure that she was forced, and such violence would end if she simply endured. However, nobody was giving her order, even though everything proceeded in its utmost annoying, absurd way.
Perhaps she did not deserve any revelation. Just look at what she had written. Objects, objects, and objects. Vorhandenheit! Be in the muddle for another hundred years. She just wrote trash. I just wrote trash.
