The Metaphysicist (Kill Your Darlings) | Featured

we're all fucked

Eventually, throughout the strips of concrete and rocks and fallen leaves the color of blood spilled from trembling wrists, the color of rust rubbed in between unsuspecting and observant fingers, the color of sunflower petals in meadows where life is all right, where life is but a trip to the sources of beauty, where life is a lie in the eyes of pessimists but a reality in the eyes of optimists and a random occurrence in the eyes of realists, perhaps more of a premonition birthed from a slight case of cherophobia, and that's quite the opposite for me. I am convinced that this blight upon the world is only a fleeting phenomenon and will pass to resume happiness, or at least the only kind of happiness that writers are endowed, but with each and each second, a welt of apprehension absorbs any loyalty to the future and warps it towards nullification.

All I know is that I need to reach Jack and Edie's house sooner so that I can talk about why Lucien is winding up in odd places both in his mind and in his location, about how I can help him when he doesn't wish to be helped, about what the final steps are to ensure that he is okay, about what will transpire if those final steps aren't so profitable for all parties. The walk is a distanced one, on the contrary, but I am still able to extend my feet towards the house in a shorter period of time than I would've expected with all of this weight on my shoulders, weight placed upon me by the person about whom I will speak with Edie today.

I scale the front steps rapidly, as if two or three extra seconds mean anything to my friend's well being, and maybe they do. After all, two or three seconds can sentence someone to life or death, plunging into the murky depths of the water after a bridge throws you off, being upright in the kitchen at one moment and smashing your temple against the counter at the next moment, fingers suspended over a totalitarian switch whose controlling nature you willingly warrant just before you slip away from its power as a cause of its power, too many instances where death is so close yet so far, where two or three seconds are more significant than one would first suspect, where I am an anxious mess who likes to fabricate excuses for mundane situations.

As I knock on the door energetically, Edie allows those two or three seconds I just regained to make her way towards the aperture, then opening it with no clue as to who it is, which is a fool's move on her part but a move of someone who isn't as nervous as I am. "Allen, what are you doing here?" Edie asks, wrapping her cardigan around her thin waist as if it's cold, when I'm colder in the November air and have not once thought to bring a jacket, though that's because the gravity of the melancholic circumstances has been transmuted into heat to the point where the chill is irrelevant and can fly by undetected.

Guarding a tone that doesn't shake, which is a harrowing and arduous task for a person whose tone is almost always shaking, I deliver the response promptly. "I need to talk about Lucien."

I probably will do much more than that, like sob about how this isn't fair to anyone around my stumbling companion because no one deserves to be unsuspecting and then struck with an atomic bomb of emotions, about how I can't live without someone as influential as Lucien Carr is to me, about how I cannot simply return to an old life of monotony and artificial intellect for the pretentious scoundrels of the internet; like shatter one of Edie's prized vases just from the thought of losing the person who has given me a home after knowing me for only a few days, the person from whom I learned so much more than school or my parents or Jack and Edie ever taught me, the person who is sliding away as if he's the silk of his voice; like scream uncontrollably without saying a word, because that is how I can articulate my feelings the most accurately, and that is how I make certain that Edie is clueless about how much I am suffering at the hands of both myself and Lucien Carr.

"Why? Has something happened to him?" Edie waits there for a few moments, anticipating my reply, but she notices a lack of politeness that I, the person to whom Edie's classic politeness is directed, wouldn't even have noticed, and she invites me into her home, an abode that reeks of lilac and the decadent ignorance of the suburbs.

This will be a long chat.

Edie sits me down on her sofa, and instantly I am transported back to the old days of this home. I used to live in this place with people who cared about me and fed me and made sure I wasn't sleeping in the frozen rain every night. And now...now I have to struggle to keep a national treasure alive, because the roles have switched. I was accustomed to being almost pampered, and now it's my turn to sustain life. This time it's harder, and I am in need of advice from the person who would've been in my situation before I moved in with Lucien.

"Allen, you haven't responded yet," Edie says, eyeing me as she takes her own place across from me. The gravity of the circumstances doesn't allow for her to make herself comfortable in the chair. "I'm worried."

"You should be. Nothing makes sense anymore."

Edie stares at me. "Is he...is he dead?"

"No, no, he's not dead, but my concern is that he will be soon."

Edie shifts in her seat, unrolls a deep but shaky breath from her lungs, eyes panicked and searching for a solution. "Oh my lord."

"I just want you to know that, and if you have any ways to help, that would be greatly appreciated." My professional facade from that phrase strips away to reveal my actual opinion on the matter. Tears follow. "I don't want to lose him."  

~~~~~

A/N: tfw edie has the chance to redeem herself but no

anthropomorphism: applying human qualities to non-humans (basically reverse furries)

~Dakotail