And/Of/Or

IV : altus

altus (adj.)
Latin
Deep [of something].

___________________

Everyone signed a red dotted line when they loved an artist, but you signed a double-point one when you loved a writer.

Writers were a little worse than your painters and photographers, carpenters or designers. Mostly because they could do all those things with none of the materials but all of the weight. Writers were amateur gods, building and demolishing worlds at their whims, leaving the rubble of them lying around on the floor, leaving the finished ones next to them in their beds for fear of leaving them somewhere too dusty. Writers wrote earth. Writers wrote meteors. Writers wrote the ocean. Writers wrote blood, bone, flesh. Writers could write you. They probably did.

But that's not the line part. The line part is that they wrote themselves. The line part was that they un-wrote themselves just as fast. The line part is that you have to be extra careful with loving writers, because if you're not paying attention, you'll blink twice too many times then forget to keep your hand open, and look back to find them already rewritten past recognition.

Ari sucked in a particularly sharp breath of smoke. He tongued at it in his mouth to poke for ideas, but it just tasted acrid and stopped at that so he let it go with an unhappy flick of his finger.

He was surprised his body had held out for as long as it did with how much blood was in his head from all the hanging-of-surfaces business. The things his mother would do to him seeing such a stupid action. The worse things his father would.

But desperate times.

"Ari?"

He closed his eyes. That voice. When unfamiliarized, it was...mahogany? No. Too vague. Think elsewhere. Sugar. Ugh, archetypal. Like...maple butter. He'd never even had maple butter. Goddammit.

"Baby, it's like three AM, what—ay." Mm, less butter at that. More like vodka. Too strong? Whiskey, then. Whiskey to vodka? Christ alive. "Do I wanna know?"

"No." And that was just honest. Ari righted himself but kept the cigarette lit. "What's wrong?"

Max leaned on the doorframe. He swept his gaze from the desk to the laptop to the cigarette to Ari. There wasn't much desk left to be seen beneath papers, pens, sticky notes, and half-eaten anythings. But at least the lamp was just above a growing stack of Monster Ultras. Whiskey to vodka to Monster Ultra? That was one to write down.

"Where to start?" he sighed. "Hey, put that out, you didn't even open the window."

Ari walked over to open the window, but Max beat him to it and plucked the cigarette from his lips. He stubbed it out on the floor and rubbed at his eyes.

"Sorry I woke you," Ari said, returning to sit on the little open space of desktop left. His chair was quickly becoming decor only.

"You didn't. You just said you'd be in bed—" He checked the clock bolted on the wall. "Four hours ago."

The sleep made Max's eyes droop and his hair flare up around his soft face. Like a black fire. Like black smoke, more so. The eyes were like...a fox's? No. They were...low. Maybe he'd focus on the first part.

"...or yesterday?"

Ari blinked. Max sighed. "I asked if you've slept."

"Yes."

"When?"

"What?"

"Come to bed," Max said. "You look tired."