Certainly kissing the most brilliant person I've ever met on the apex of the Ferris wheel is overcoming some sort of fear, and whether that's the fear of the ride or the fear of becoming intimate with him, I have no idea, but I at least know that it was truly magnificent, and I wish I could relive it, but unfortunately we're back in the apartment that looks even dingier now that we've returned from something so beautiful at the carnival from last night, and Lucien has already left for yet another boring day of work at the library, where he doesn't want to be but needs to be in order to sustain our residence at this house, however cluttered it may be.
His absence is a motive to think about him even more than usual, how the lights flickering in the background of the carnival also flickered in his ocean eyes, how having him here with me transformed the circus from something harrowing to something pleasurable, how he allowed me to overcome two fears of mine by replacing them with jovial memories of just him and his everlasting grace, and ever since then, I cannot remove him from my mind.
On the contrary, maybe the visit of someone else will occupy my thoughts instead of Lucien Carr. Edie had texted me earlier this morning to say that she would be dropping by the apartment to chat with me and catch up on all that we've been doing, which is a lot in my case and probably not much in hers, unless Jack has done something wild again that landed her in some sort of emergency that has now been subdued enough for her to be telling me about it on her visit. I have no desire to clean up the place, as I'm both lazy and unsure that it will stay in its state of cleanliness for very long, primarily when Lucien arrives at the house after a prolonged work period of cataloguing things uselessly at the Paterson library, and although Edie is a very tidy person who will probably straighten things up during her minor vacation here, I'm not going to assist her, as she'll clear enough things up in a matter of minutes while she pretends to be listening and not silently judging me for being so sordid.
So now we wait for Edie to knock on the door without daring to ever press the doorbell that she hates for some reason unknown to me, which is becoming increasingly strenuous when Lucien has warped me into a person of action who cannot wait for other people to propel their lives forward, more so than I was before, so it's a blessing when I detect the rumbling noise of a fist upon the wooden aperture, signaling my motherly friend's arrival.
Leaping from the chair in which I always sit since moving into the apartment, I make my way downstairs towards the door, then swinging it open widely to reveal the smiling face of Edie Parker, a wicker basket of fruit under a red checkered cloth and a bottle of sparkling lemonade in her hands, which she extends to me with the faith that I'll be able to recognize what to do with them, but I soon understand faster than I would've thought, and I accept them and carry them upstairs as she follows me.
"Sorry about the mess," I apologize, though I'm not really going to do anything about it, but there's no doubt that she will.
"Oh, it's fine," Edie assures me, glancing all around the haggard apartment and trying to hide her disgust with my living style, even if most of this was imposed by Lucien, who is at the library right now and can't absorb the blame, but being the kind person that she is, she redirects the blame to herself. "I suppose it was a bit of a short notice."
I realize that her permission to be so sloppy is born out of fallacy to fabricate the politeness that she claims we all need in our lives, and I'm not going to argue it, but even if she gave me a week heads up about her visit, I still wouldn't clean up, though I don't tell her that, because she'd either apologize again for no logical reason besides civil obedience, or she would be internally annoyed that I must contradict everything with my socially inept behavior, but that's just how I am, and he is aware of that, but she's nevertheless critical of it, as if I can help being so fucking weird.
Once I've scaled the staircase with a slope grand enough to annihilate me, I stride to the kitchen to wash the fruit that Edie has probably already washed, but I need something to do, and so does she, so I direct her, "Make yourself at home."
Edie frowns at the display of unfinished manuscripts and random forks stuck in the wall from Lucien's target practice game when his store of ideas is out of stock in every item, and she lightly kicks a soda can away from her personal bubble as if it will consume her. "I can barely reach any furniture, Allen."
I shrug, juggling with a bunch of grapes the color of Edie's deep purple blouse and studying them like they're an alien race while I answer the woman. "Yeah, well, you can blame Lucien for that."
Edie, reserving a calm countenance meant to pry into my life easier, walks her hands across the arm of my favorite chair in the hopes of acquiring some information about my rowdy roommate. "Speaking of Lucien, are you sure he's a suitable match for you?"
I halt my activity of washing the grapes, as they're the only thing I'll clean in this apartment, and I almost drop the bundle before regaining my grip on them but not on my stability. "What do you mean by 'a suitable match'?"
I can comprehend that Edie doesn't favor Lucien as much as I do, or really favor him at all, because as far as she knows, he's a seductress whose power was too potent to resist, a seductress who pulled me into his trap of an apartment and injected me with impulsivity so that I'd abandon her and Jack without so much as a word to them about it, and I'm truly sorry about that, but it already transpired, and life is meant to be lived in the infinitely splitting second of the present, as the seductress would preach, but Edie is far from cognizant of this.
"You had only seen him about three times before he asked you to move in with you. Is that not unhealthy?"
Is this not her only argument? Yes, it is true, but it's also overexposed. Okay, so I did move in with Lucien after only a few encounters with him, but life isn't about planning. Life is about welcoming the danger addressing you with bared teeth and filing them down to stubs so that they can't hurt you anymore, not mapping out every step on the road, because quite frankly, no human can predict those kinds of things, and that's why spontaneity is so imperative to Lucien and me.
"We're doing fine," I mutter, resuming my activity of washing the grapes with part of my vision still sneakily pointed towards Edie like a dog guilty of a crime they'd prefer to hide from, a dog who also wishes to see what's going on.
"Well okay then."
Not satisfied by Edie's last remark and assuming that there are undertones of sarcasm, as it is with her motherly personality, I continue with my spiel, which is not advised but flows to me out of a misplaced peevishness. "Why don't you like him?"
"Look, Allen," Edie starts, a sigh being regurgitated from her wearied lungs. "We're not talking about this."
"But you hate him, don't you?"
Something I detest is when my friends hate my other friends, because I love them all, and most of the time I love them all equally, so to see that they're divided over something that I could overcome is a concerning notion, and it's a notion that's manifesting between Edie and Lucien. Lucien was somewhat sardonic on the phone with Edie a few days ago, but he most likely wasn't sardonic enough to trigger the label of an aberration forced upon him by my mother of a friend, though he did basically steal me from her, so part of Edie's animosity towards him is justified, I suppose, but I'm nonetheless going to defend the person who has changed my life forever, because that's too much of a distinction to ignore.
"I would actually like to invite you two to dinner tomorrow night at our house, so I'm not sure if that's born out of a hate for your friend or not," Edie negates sarcastically, silencing my fervid attacks.
I haven't visited Jack and Edie's house in a while, ever since I moved in with Lucien and have since been engrossed in the strangeness of his ordeals, and I hadn't planned on returning to that house. It's been nowhere near my mind, neither a desire to sojourn there nor a desire to stay away from there, just a past memory that sometimes flashes in my brain for a split second and then departs just as hastily, but to return to Jack and Edie's house after being away for so long is a tad worrying, as I haven't seen Jack in a while, and Edie is callous towards me because of that.
Hopefully I can mend my faulty ways and bring Lucien along to help me with that, so I nod my head and accept the offer.
~~~~~
A/N: Edie is my mom but now that I've been writing her I realise that she can actually be not so good
positivism: belief that scientific fact is the only knowledge
~Dakotraining-in-karate