The Metaphysicist (Kill Your Darlings) | Featured

feast on my gay ambitions

Each month, the generous Edie Parker holds a mandatory dinner upstairs, which means that I am to crawl out of the depths of the basement to actually socialize with people, of all monstrous activities. Just by this description that I've given though my own words, one can easily decipher that I am not a big fan of this tradition.

Now, Edie is a lovely person. She really is, and anyone you'd ask would agree with you. She volunteers at animal hospitals, bakes cookies free of charge for school fundraisers to distribute, handles everything for her incompetent husband. The problem, however, is that I am not a lovely person as she is, and I often spoil the mood when invited to the dinner table once a month.

Residing in a basement in the time after you've fled from college is a suitable drug for evolution into a sleep deprived beast whose greatest accomplishment is not passing out at three in the morning when it's abstained from rest for five days, and that transformation entails relinquishing all sociability it may have once possessed, because it frankly doesn't need it in a basement, and people all around will advise it to drop the unnecessary forces in its life to live weightlessly, and I have certainly lost a lot of weight.

Part of this is because I mostly survive off of cup noodles and spite for rhyme and meter and my brain that just so happens to urge me to write when that's the last thing I want to do, and it's a rare occasion that I visit the realm of upstairs to feast on peas and pasta and the nutrition I need but never receive in the prison cell called the basement, where not even sunlight filters its vitamins through the blinds to nourish me, so really it's like I've mutated into an inhuman figure incapable of emotion beyond the ritualistic excursions of my daily life.

And then sometimes, when I'm in the dark like always, my fingers sore from ranting digitally about what I hate in life, I remind myself that in each set of four weeks there is a dreadful event to look forward to, and that is the mandatory dinner occurring each month, where I die again and require rehabilitation merely from interacting with humans who are aware I'm feeding on them but never cross me because I'm basically a bear, and by some luck Lucien is not afraid of me.

But Lucien isn't here right now. He's at the library or at his own home where I don't mean a thing to him, as he's most likely watching a nature documentary to laugh at the dramatic American style of narration, as if a leaf is the mightiest object in the whole world just because its markings are unique, also pointing out that all markings are unique for different species.

Even if he's not here with me right now, he's supplied me with a plethora of magical tales to spill across the table like I usually spill wine, and for that I'm thankful, as I'm both lighting a conversation and stimulating the mind that's been raving about him for the past day.

Usually we waste the time in silence, or at least my silence, while Edie attempts to spur Jack into a conversation about what happened at work today, as if anything exciting passes by that dull focus of his who only absorbs the information from online video games he's not supposed to be playing in the workplace, and when that's fruitless, Edie accepts that she's finished, because I never talk to her even when my life is stocked with mystery and suffering and an interesting dinner table story. This time, on the contrary, I am ready to offer something to the conversation.

"So, Jack, how was work today?" Edie inquires, the traditional question that I can only assume is asked at every dinner, not just the mandatory monthly one, which must be quite the bore to Jack, who never has anything new to propose. It's especially boring for me now that I'm anxiously anticipating the time where I can ramble on and on about the first new human I've met in a while.

Jack fondles the peas with the tip of his fork, swirling them around with his hand crashing into his cheekbone yet never answering his wife, but after she's been staring at him for a while, he finally relents. "Yeah, it was fine, same as always."