The Metaphysicist (Kill Your Darlings) | Featured

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I'm still caught in the haze that is Lucien's apartment, with all of its dirtiness and its sordidness and its resemblance to the fiery depths of hell where our minds have been all along, and everything feels distorted, like a wobbly lens has been slid over the main lens to warp my surroundings towards delirium and a delusion that I am either dying or losing my wits with the speed of a cargo train shipping them away, because none of this makes sense, both this apartment and my reasoning for deciding to live in it with another person who isn't one of my mental demons.

Why would I do that? I'm such a solitary person, locked up in a basement by choice, not because I'm being forced into it even by something as minor as subliminal messaging or the desire for captivity by effect of Stockholm syndrome, but now I'm out in the real word. I met someone whom I would willingly call my friend, and now I'm living in the apartment that is too blurry for its own good, and I have no idea what the hell is happening to me right now.

My blood cells are drops of a poison that no one can place. My lungs are the tattered remnants of a house after a storm. My heart is the dilapidated leftovers of a uniform after war. It is required to be there, but it is no longer functional, and no one can see that underneath that uniform there is a gaping bullet wound that's selling all my secrets to the grave. My life is in ruins, in rags, in the hell that I have created to punish myself, and I am finally drowning in it, in my long awaited success.

Yet this isn't where I'm supposed to be. This is all off, nothing like the underworld that I had imagined since I learned to imagine death and all things tragic that really aren't tragic to those who want it yet never receive it because the world has a knack for teasing us with our greatest faiths. This is not that, nowhere near it. I'm confused in this location, but I'm not confused enough to ignore the fact that this apartment is not where I should be.

This path I've chosen irrationally to follow will lead me straight to a cesspool who might be better than this place in the way that it's much clearer, because in this place there are plates all across the carpeted floor with probably molding hardwood underneath, and in this place there is the haunting threat of paper cuts from the scarlet inked manuscripts piled on the various chairs of the apartment, and in this place there is a man whom I met only a few days ago but is now my roommate, and I'm fucking petrified of what will happen to me and to him, as if the house is a monster seeking us both with the sharp teeth of broken glass on guard at the windowsill, with the sandpaper tongue of the carpet in the entrance hall, with the swaying chandelier arming itself for destruction upon our unsuspecting heads marked by crumbling halos, and I don't trust this place.

How can I trust anything when I can't even trust my mind, the core part of who I am, the one who controls my bodily operations, the one who controls what I think, how I act, what I decide, though this recent decision is faulty? How can I not be clutching the walls to break free of the approaching locus of the couch only to step away from that wall for fear that it will consume me, too? How can I settle down when Lucien is shaking me and telling me that there's nothing, because I see it all, and that certainly isn't a nothing or even a quiet existence at all?

There's a jolting in my bones, like a thousand doctors huddled in a hospital room with the emergency of a failing heart, with their paddles poised to shock me back into living a life I don't want to live anymore, living a life that ushered me towards this route of fogginess and confusion. There are hands on me, suffocating and sharp, clenching and retracting like atria and ventricles pulsing in unison to sustain something, that something being my perpetual terror, attempting to pull me towards something, and their efforts shoot light into my blearing eyes until it's all like walking on the sun, my feet crisping and flying away into more and more lava, my corneas burning and burning and burning towards ebony, towards surrender, towards complete and utter decay, towards everything that I've hidden from, everything that I hate, everything that I'll admit I'm scared of, everything that injects tears into my cheeks and injects positions of a ball into my legs and injects the singular notion that I am not where I am supposed to be, as I've said time and time again.