The Metaphysicist (Kill Your Darlings) | Featured

all this mouth does is complain

Lucien is no doubt spontaneous, but with that spontaneity comes stubbornness, which I really didn't need in a moment of laboring to lug Lucien out of the locked bathroom stall and back into the main dining area where he would sit the fuck down and resume the activity he had planned earlier today in order to celebrate my blog's perpetual success and hope to neglect the minor argument that ensued this morning. But none of that happened. I stayed, but I stayed alone.

It required at least ten minutes worth of talking -- or it at least seemed like ten minutes -- to lure Lucien out of his bathroom stall, the only protection for a man like him who is usually so outgoing and fearless but was then shivering at the sight of something whose identity I am unaware of, and he was extremely reluctant, but this is not the sort of reluctance that comprises Lucien's character, rather a reluctance birthed out of a phobia of doing something, not because he prefers to go his own way in life and fuck the opinions of others.

The man who exited the bathroom stall was not the man I know, the man who cackles in the home of fear, the man who follows his whims without considering the consequences because he'll find a way out of them, the man who jumps from topic to topic like life is more fleeting than it actually is. That is not the one I saw. The man who exited the bathroom stall was broken, and irreversibly so. He's seen monsters unlike nothing I've ever witnessed, and he just saw another one.

Lucien elucidated the fact that he is powerful to me a while ago, and I have long since understood that, but this is not him, and this is not me. Why would Lucien Carr run from danger? Why would Lucien Carr refuse to address it again once calming down enough to unlock the door to the bathroom stall and depart? Why would Lucien Carr be in shambles after seeing something that should only slightly piss him off at the least? Yeah, I don't know what that something was, but how terrible could it be? It's a fancy restaurant in which he noticed it, for god's sake! He loves to overreact, yet I don't suppose this is much of an overreaction, as his kinds of overreactions are marked by a high volume and a philosophical lesson afterwards, but all I received after he finally emerged from the bathroom stall was a man in the fetters of his own mind.

Stripped of dignity, we paint with crimson blood and cascading tears smeared across canvases as broad as the institutions that kept us in tight locks, in cells and in chambers and in our own flaking minds whose only deliverance is the knife of revenge where finally the fluid chipped is not our own, where the grave is the best location we can attain for matter destroyed by tantalizing objections and taunting whispers of what could be but what hasn't been for a while, sculpting features into daggers to impress squares, huffing paint in a back alleyway and hoping to be arrested because prison has better food than food for thought, though we have been starving for a while — starved of our confidence, starved of our trust, starved of nostalgic nights under blankets and peaceful misconceptions in the burrows of Paterson, where morals stride unquenched through bustling city streets, where our ears cloud over with soot to neglect the pleas of our mothers ordering us to wash the dishes left dirty from the mercurial age of thirteen, pubescence clenched between teeth wracked in the standardized wires of conformity who also conform solely by existing, who serve as a role model imposed by idols creasing with each lie they fold under their skin to contemplate later. This is the rebellion we have created, and this is our jailbreak after years of suppression.

But Lucien is somehow weakened by this rebellion, by this jailbreak, by the sight of something whose influence over him he never would've predicted, which throws a wrench in this artistic revolution of his, and now he's inordinately sorry about what transpired at the restaurant, apologizing over and over to me as we glide into the streets to settle down and drift across the sea of sleep to a place where all is better than life really is, but we can't reach that state when Lucien is chattering about how he ruined everything for me and how he was inadvertently exaggerating and only now realizes the effects of his intractability, though I'm not blaming him for any of it. He didn't ruin anything, and I'm much more concerned with his belief that he did ruin it than with the vagary itself.