The Metaphysicist (Kill Your Darlings) | Featured

I love death and being dead

I was foolishly praying, as I promenaded through the winding aisles of the local supermarket on the hunt for sustenance, that Lucien's attitude would have improved by the time I ventured back home, but as I said, it was a foolish prayer, and the moment I stepped into the house I could detect that nothing had shifted at all. He was still the same morose pile of laziness and spite, sipping the tiniest amount of tea just so that he could press it in between his berry lips as if he were killing it.

I assume that's all he did, as Lucien didn't appear to wreck anything while I was out. In fact, it looks as though he didn't move anything at all, merely touched it at the most like a middle-aged white woman gliding her fingers along the walls of an abandoned house before she is captured by the umbrageous heart within. My roommate may be too wearied to do anything except sip that godforsaken tea that's driving a wrench into our communication because it's "not like he can do anything while he's drinking, sorry".

It's obvious that he didn't want to talk to me, instead muttering something about how he needed to cleanse himself, and shuffling off to the bathroom to spend who knows how long in the shower while I pondered where the hell his conviviality went, as this is not the Lucien Carr by whom I was enchanted when I first met him at the Paterson Public Library.

This could be because Lucien is only degenerating steadily, tumbling down the stairs yet rolling too quickly to detect where each ledge is and when he falls from it, or it could be because something happened while I was out at the store trying to feed the person who is losing his ability to do so himself, and while both are catastrophic occurrences to Lucien's health, it's no secret that the latter could be far more harmful than the former, especially because that occurrence could continue to manifest later down the road of gravely daggers and slick blades of grass creeping onto the path, and perhaps the worst part about this is that Lucien will never tell me what that occurrence was unless he pens it into a suicide note that he would never leave because it's tacky and cliche and unlike him to give the world something when he owes it nothing, and all of this is falling apart right in front of me, with no solution in sight.

Lucien says I shouldn't protest what is irreversible, but Lucien also says that nothing he does in life matters, when in reality it does matter if he can affect future generations sprawled across the map of time until our fiery life source becomes our death source. He can do so much, yet he chooses to ignore it to instead waste away in a dingy old apartment he can barely afford with the meager job he was able to attain after skipping college to unchain himself. When I try to express how much Lucien has changed my perspective on life, he only retaliates with the concept that I am only as enlightened as I am impressionable, and that his words are only scaffolding for the building of my mind, a hollow frame to support my own potential, and I know he's just trying to be humble, despite shouting every thought he has about homosexuality in Greek and Roman mythology to the library patrons on the table in his fucking workplace, but he should really give himself more credit, tell himself that his life isn't worthless, that it's one of the rare few that imperatively craves to be lived, even if he struggles to live it.

But no, that's not what he's going to do. All that he is going to do is waste an hour or so in the shower, allowing mitigated tears to plop against his back as his head hangs weighted by his feet and his soul vaporizes into steam insinuating the mirror upon which he will etch his last farewell. And it's not like I can burst through the bathroom door and talk to my roommate, as I'll be labeled a creep for lack of better, more rational words, and it's anyway harsh to interrupt him while he's enjoying one of his limited moments of peace, so I only wait for him to emerge, however far in the future that will be.

While nothing has been disturbed in the apartment from an inside man, I notice that there is a new voicemail left from someone outside of the house. Lucien Carr may be an extraordinary man, but he isn't popular (sometimes he's feared for being so wild and in people's faces), and to the extent of my knowledge, I was unaware that he had any friends besides me, and maybe Edie and Jack if he's feeling unjustly audacious. Lucien is the type of person to brag about his friends, not lure them into secrecy from his best friend, as if I could be jealous when I hold the top spot, so who the hell could this voicemail be from?