The Metaphysicist (Kill Your Darlings) | Featured

prepare for homosexuality

I haven't visited a carnival since I was ten years old, out with my parents for a special occasion after my father read in the newspaper that the most spectacular circus he saw when in Italy was sojourning in the town, and he had recently received a raise from his boss, a man who usually pushed him towards every breaking point but withdrew him right before the wire of his stability cracked and he tumbled to the dirt. That carnival was an amazing experience while it lasted, despite the masses of people filing in and out of my vision and swarming all around my heavily guarded periphery, because back then I wasn't nearly as anxious as I am now, so carnivals were the highlight of my life when I hadn't yet delved into my passion for metaphysical writing and existential despair, and they were the source of my daydreaming fun.

My mother had won me a stuffed bear that year, as blue as Lucien's ocean eyes with prospect as grand as his, and I've cherished it ever since. However, that treasury only exists in my mind, as an unfortunate event two months after the carnival excursion bulldozed my teddy bear to the point of no return, and yes, I was devastated, but why have corporeal items when you can reserve them in your mind without the clutter? That's kind of what writing is, now that I think about it — storing different types of underworlds in your mind for different types of demons, avoiding the conflict of reality whenever it is possible, fabricating stories out of the magic of white and grey brain matter joining together in pure humanity, everything that could ever be stocked inside of an organ and that organ's outward personality.

But now my organ and my organ's outward personality have turned against me, betrayed the qualities with which I thought I was familiar until those are only the remnants of a well fed childhood, but now I am a writer who writes because they have involuntarily neglected the bliss of joy because of our distorted personalities slandered by adulthood. That is the sole thing we writers are adept at, because we are burrowed in trenches and in all of the broken places so that we may be forgotten. We who are estranged from civil decency will die in civil decency, because the world strives to lure us into our worst fears without blinking, writing us into stories we are unaware of, and in that doom is where we rot against the unforgiving splinters of our coffins, never to be seen again as internalized rage ferments inside of us like wine as ancient as our hatred for institution.

And it is a blight when a writer such as that is forced to venture outside for something as commercial as a carnival (especially after writing a fiery rant about capitalism just days before) when they'd much rather dwell in their manmade underworlds and dingy basements, not be greeted by people I'll never see again, people who will sprout poisonous berries of envy towards others in a matter of seconds once they glimpse an item as mundane as a prize that they've won from an almost impossible game, and writers despise those people. Those are the people writers write about, the annoying side character who just won't leave, no matter what the protagonist does, but even if there aren't too many people like that, people in general are a curse to a writer.

There are lots of citizens at carnivals, which is a blessing for Lucien, who enjoys observing every aspect of life somatized into bodies tinged by sunspots and wrinkles and skin tones and everything that the world has deposited upon them, but it's a curse for me, who despises human interaction and would have been content with living in Edie and Jack's basement until I die from a lack of nutrition and Vitamin D, and though my social skills have improved since I moved in with Lucien, they're still not at the approximate baseline of the average human, but Lucien will not settle unless he's repented for a crime that he doesn't need to repent, and I can't just refuse a night on the exclusively theatrical town with my best friend to protect my limited comfort zone, shriveled to the size of a pea, and he's joyous in this moment, as he waits for the administrator clad in an outrageous clown costume to permit him to enter the carnival, because it's clear that he is quite enamored by these places, and I don't hope to ruin that for him. Even if this is to repent but Lucien is here mostly to have a good time, I won't judge him for that, because a good time is something he deserves and has deserved for a while. Metaphysicists like him need a break sometimes.