The Metaphysicist (Kill Your Darlings) | Featured

excuse me curfew is at 4:20

Maybe I should've known that this wouldn't work out, and maybe I should've tried harder, but I'm nevertheless suspended in Lucien's demeaning gaze as he expects an answer that I cannot give, and I swear to God that I'm done, because in the pitfalls of my insufferable youth I made the mistake of falling in love with someone who would leave me, and I can't fucking handle that.

I am not a man to cower in the face of death, but that is not what this is. This is much more than death to a single person, much more than a shadowed funeral limited by the paltry size of my bank account. This is the death of Lucien Carr, a brilliant writer and an extraordinary human, yes, but it is also the death of the ideas that could've been sprung from his head, the death of new movements and new freedom from the archaic rhyme and meter, the death of people he could've inspired to create their own amazing futures, people like me.

I may be able to document some of those ideas in writing or in speeches I'm too nervous to deliver in order to inspire blossoming writers as a result, but it will feel as plastic as a biography written by someone who lives in a different century than the subject. With Lucien, he was so far above me that I felt as detached as that biography writer, no matter how fervidly Lucien attempted to draw me into his ramblings. I simply cannot understand what his mind possesses, because everyone experiences things differently, but philosophers present their concepts as facts engraved on the tombstone of morality, unwavering in the inky silhouettes of a cultural deviant, and it's like we followers are tripping behind. I can do so no longer, and I must provide Lucien with an answer, however crappy it is.

"Maybe the richest things are only rich because of their density." I'm full of complete and utter bullshit, but it is complete and utter bullshit that Lucien needs, so long as he can derive his own significance from it, and by the partially consoled expression on Lucien's tear-stained face, I can decipher that my plan was successful, and he has derived the right amount of significance for him to be halfway calmed.

On the contrary, Lucien presents the opposite effect than I would've predicted, diving back into his self-deprecation. "I ruined any riches we could've shared."

Mending Lucien will be a great task, but if I am able to achieve it, the outcome will be the most splendid thing I will ever witness. I will have maintained the splendor of my best friend for as long as he needs me to maintain it, and if I am prosperous enough, then in time he will be able to maintain it for himself, but all of this is wishful thinking, daydreaming to construct a shield against the wreck shivering before me because I don't want to believe that this is what my companion has come to.

It is time to stride past all of my doubts about helping him, time to poke out my elbows to jab my opposers with a weapon created solely by me as a part of me, and if I require more pretentious bullshit to assist my crumbling friend, so be it.

Slipping a hand around my companion's cheek like a mother helping their child through panic, I drill my chocolate eyes right into Lucien's ocean blues, dulled by a storm overhead and dulling still, and forcefully state, "You are flavored by the forbidden, but do not think for one moment that it makes you any less beautiful."

Too often I have witnessed in the media writers who have cascaded into darkness because the qualities of which they were once proud have become the bane of their existence due to other people's faulty judgments of them, and I'm not about to allow Lucien to suffer the same fate. Yes, he may be destined for a fate just as agonizing, but he is too magnificent to fall towards the deceiving pillows of the mainstream, no matter how easy it may seem to do so.

In order to release some of the tension of being told for once that he shouldn't go and fucking die, Lucien laughs nervously. "Next you're going to say you support meter."