Bile

It is quite surprising to learn that bile's main function is to carry away waste. The overproduction of it produces a watery stool, much like what can be seen in the style of The Persistence of Memory. As with the painting, the rigidity and softness of time is criticized, and it is in memory that all time is wreaked havoc on. 

Bile is also a green humor associated with envy since the ancients; green as rebirth is a modern invention. To overproduce bile means to have an illness, which the Romans understood as envy of another, perhaps of a healthier state, perhaps of a different state altogether.

A healthier state, a different state altogether: I am quite jealous of the woman who could summon you to cross borders. 

(For she can summon you, and thus dismiss you: is that not what Neil Gaiman said? "Never summon what you cannot dismiss"? The summoning is not as important as the dismissal: any idiot can be summoned, but it takes an awakened courage to be dismissed.

How absurd, to be jealous of a memory, of a slice of time!)

But then - oh, what else do we have to be envious of, except memory? Envying the past, after all, brings forth a noble nostalgia for times when things worked, when man labored and loved, when things made sense, when the world was round and full of curves in the horizon beyond which natives lived with their gold, their spice, their cloth. Memory, after all, is pregnant the way the present moment cannot be - has no right to be, and can never be. (Not for nothing have I a tattoo of St. Augustine's Ipsum me non dicam praeter illam on me - for I, indeed, am nothing but my memory.)

"Bile acids (BA) can independently modulate the function and effects of the brain (Nunes et al., 2012; Bazzari et al., 2019), gut (Zhou et al., 2020, and gut microbiome (van Best et al., 2020), while each of these layers of the brain-gut-microbiome axis may contribute to the overall outcome in the brain (Garcia et al., 2022; Lirong et al., 2022; Mahmoudian Dehkordi et al., 2022; Qu et al., 2022). Hence, there is a large spectrum and significant complexity in how BA and the intestinal flora affect brain function. While current work examines the correlation between specified BA or bacterial targets and the changes in neurological outcomes, it is still a work in progress to dissociate their role and independent effects on brain functions."

Since I am a bastard I will jump on to the hole in the research, ("the direct significance of altered BA levels or ratios in defined neurodegenerative conditions is elusive.") and posit: It would be nice if bile itself were related to long-term memory regulation, such that drowning in bile is responsible for too much nostalgia, and too much jealousy, such that relationship breakups result in the process. It is perfect reasoning, then, to say goodbye, because one's bile was haywire and the memory of the past envied over became more important than the now. 

Work cited: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/neuroscience/articles/10.3389/fnins.2023.1123967/full