The Metaphysicist (Kill Your Darlings) | Featured

you used to call me on my hell phone

While Lucien was sleeping earlier this morning, that was my first opportunity to do as I please in his apartment, and that was to explore the place and tidy it up once I realized how fucking atrocious it is, with wrappers and manuscripts and pens all over the floor until you can no longer spy the white carpet from beneath the striking abundance of those sundry items, and now that Lucien is in the shower after wordlessly spilling milk all over his shirt, I have snagged another opportunity to perhaps do something different before, because in all honesty there's no saving this mess of an apartment.

I remember that I haven't talked to Edie in a while, and I have some things to brag about, except those things that will enable me to boast are also things that Edie is far too unaware of, meaning that she most likely assumes I'm dead in an alley somewhere, because when an asocial person finally ventures outside of the house after staying locked up in a dingy basement for practically their entire life after escaping the hell that is college, horrid events are bound to occur, at least in Edie's perception, so she must be terribly worried about my wellbeing and just hasn't called yet, as I'm never on my cell phone to answer anyway, and that indelible fact about me has wiped her memory of calling as a possibility in the completest of senses, so I'll call her instead and soothe her worries, for I'd rather not have the police on my tail and accuse me of partaking in a flagrant homosexual affair with the people who are known to be possibly the most homosexual, which are unanimously metaphysical writers.

I don't have enough money to be caught up in a police investigation, and neither does Lucien, but none of that is relevant when I'm not forcing him to help me with anything, and also it isn't my job to inform Edie of my whereabouts anyway. I'm an adult, even if I don't act like it, and I've just embarked on a new journey into the strange corners of life that gather dust from the minorities called poets, their brain fog and their salvaged curios, their creations only limited by how far their hand can extend into the dark matter of their mind, and this is a troubling life, but it's an interesting one, and I'd much rather witness it with all of its flaws than stay pent up in a basement that spikes the air with an icy chill whenever it pleases, but I don't suppose that excuses my lack of communication with the woman who has fed me and housed me since I graduated from college, and it's my duty to call her.

Sometimes I think that I've forgotten how to operate a cell phone, despite storing it in my pocket and carrying it around with me wherever I go as a sort of anchor that's always there, and to remove it would throw off my balance and produce an empty sort of feeling in my step and in my mind as it races to try and figure out what's wrong, but today I am mostly prepared to dial Edie's number and call her without any issues from my isolated personality.

Even though I barely utilize my cell phone, I have still memorized the numbers of both Jack and Edie as an emergency resource for when the device in my pocket is actually fruitful, so I punch in the string of digits and wait for Edie to pick up, not taking into account the fact that it's nine o'clock in the morning and she's one to sleep until two o'clock in the afternoon as if she has nothing to do with her life when really that should be me. Frankly, I don't give a shit, because if she's as on edge as she would need to be for this call to be appropriate, she's either a light sleeper in order to catch my call when it comes, or she never received any rest at all through her harrowing night of fretfulness.

The ringing is the only sound to guide me through the seconds and tens of seconds and eventually twenty seconds, until the speaker crackles.

"Hey, Edie. It's Allen," I greet sheepishly, my hands shaking in the subtlest of manners, and that's how I maintain it, even if no one is here to see how nervous I am to be talking to a woman who will surely be reprimanding me pretty damn soon.

There's an abbreviated pause at the other end of the line, marked by astonishment that I'm actually alive and not in the dirt of some stranger's back lawn. "Allen! Where the hell have you been? Jack and I have been so concerned!"