Peroxide (Peterick)

square up motherfucker

The ocean on the wall has cultivated a life of its own, if only inside the ridges of paint and canvas above the headboard, and it now dances before me, curling its waves to ride the sky with a pleasant giggle as it subconsciously snubs me for being so trapped in a world where I could easily step away, but it's just an ocean, and it doesn't know anything about me.

And yet, through its haughtiness, the water offers a location in which I could drown, and that concept has become intriguing to me, omnipresent in an already suffocating mind, and aloofness is irrelevant in death.

Perhaps it's a hallucination how the waves veer into each other — such wonders are typical for me, and treating them with a psychologist is partially why I wish to drown — but it's mesmerizing nonetheless, so hypnotizing that I can feel the liquid painting my lungs already, erecting a tower of water within the organ so essential to life, and I'm already on my way to the grave.

The sensation is nectarous once you shun the fact that my funeral will continue to be planned frivolously, but it's not like it's significant once I'm dead, so I beckon the water into my body until it will conquer my soul and glue my lashes shut, and even if I'm still animate, I won't protest, because it will all be over soon anyway.

The existence of Pete Wentz obstructs any further thought of decomposition, and it seems as though I should be hiding something from him physically, but the only thing around me is the water in my lungs, and that's a gratifying being...yet it should be protected still.

"Are you all right after...you know?" Pete's whiskey eyes have lost their bite, enameled by an untraceable gloom that pursues his weary feet as he enters with a close latch on the door.

"Um, yeah, I'm fine." My words are spiders in delicacy, fusing a web of betrayal, but Pete is apprehensive.

"That's great and all, but" — my friend descends onto the edge of the mattress, a pensive incision whittling his movement — "that's one of the most common human lies."

My tone slopes into disappointment, deadpanning, "So when it's candid, it's never believed."

"Well it's rarely candid, so it shouldn't be a problem." Pete's head angles in discouragement, dooming me to a fate of a gnarled stomach.

"Is this not a rarity?"

"This is evasion." My companion's voice is like rock, beaten away towards disintegration and the chastisement of my perspective.

"I would've thought you'd noticed me evading you since the day we met."

Brows careening, Pete challenges me. "Who's to say I didn't?"

"Please," I counter, a laugh being coughed up. "Anyone who is cognizant that I'm a freak doesn't stick around for the aftermath."

"You hated when Spencer and Jon called me a freak." Pete zooms in on my lips, weathered by the teeth around it, and such can be predicted by confiding in those you shouldn't. "Why do you do it to yourself?"

"Because they were liars, but I'm not."

"You say that all the time, but everyone is a liar, Patrick." Pete entangles his hands in mine, a lachrymose elocution showering his vocal chords. "Everyone."

"No, that's impossible." I snatch my hands away, frightened by the idea of my theoretical amorality. "I am not a liar."

"But you're lying right now." A quizzical expression chars my friend's face. "It's a paradox, you see."

Discomfort scars my countenance, a shift to my shoulders chasing it. "Then fuck paradoxes, okay?"

A chuckle cuts the tension with incomparable precision, a sort of clemency. "That's not exactly how things operate."