The Metaphysicist (Kill Your Darlings) | Featured

we're all fucked

Everyone knows that writers aren't okay, have never been okay, and will never be okay, because that's just how their minds work to produce the beauty with which they are unfamiliar due to their extensive life in hell. They document their dreams with a film of nostalgia slid over the top, a bittersweet distortion to a land where anything is possible yet everything is dark in the subtlest of manners, and that's a writer's innate job, bestowed upon them by the gentle and generous hands of talent, and Lucien Carr is a writer like that.

I have seen his philosophical spiels that are meant to enlighten but rather run down a gloomier road, and that's part of being a writer. I know that. However, I have never seen him so blatantly in shambles, not like he was on the front steps of his apartment, a dwindling bottle of whiskey strapped in fingers that could barely hold it. That is not the Lucien Carr I know, and quite frankly, I'm terrified to know him and where he originated from, because I might already have inferred the answer, and it declares that Lucien has always stored these tendrils of dread in his heart that pumps with passion for both good and evil, and those tendrils of dread have only poked out occasionally, not manifested in the full form of a broken man sweating on the porch of a place that is supposed to protect him but couldn't restrain the ash of his soul as well as it needed to.

And really I have no one to talk to about this, because Lucien is both the victim and the perpetrator, and Jack doesn't give a shit about anything except for banking and the daily newspaper, and Edie has never trusted Lucien and will probably just exclaim that she was correct all along and that Lucien is a bad influence on me and that she knew it would come to this, but Edie Parker is my only hope in this situation, so I'll go to her, no matter how reluctant I am about it. My selfish anxiety isn't going to prohibit my will to receive help for my best friend.

Lucien is already at the library, which is rather surprising, considering he was chugging whiskey last night and could barely stand up straight and is most likely now in a wretched hangover that his manager will punish him vigorously for, but at least he's not here with his cunning ears to ask me why I'm sneaking out of the house so secretively and why I haven't told him about this, and eventually he would figure it out with his sharp perceptive skills, but he's thankfully at work and being granted a proper scolding from his manager, because in all honesty it's not professional to be drunk on the job. Edie, on the other hand, is in her home like always, which is a blessing for me, as I won't have to track her down throughout the winding city of Paterson, New Jersey just to inform her that my screw up of a friend has screwed up even more, so everything is set for my mission, and I can visit Jack and Edie's house safely.

The walk to Jack and Edie's cozy little cottage in the suburbs of Paterson is a strenuous one, despite the apparent niceness of their neighborhood, and it's not that the neighborhood isn't nice. It's just that there is a lot of weight on my shoulders, weight that I cannot handle, weight that I didn't know would be imposed upon me, weight that I cannot ignore no matter how hard I try, because this weight is indelible, but this weight is not mine. It belongs to Lucien Carr, whose troubles have manifested in more weight upon his friends while never scooping some of itself up to deposit to others, only multiplying at an alarming rate and spooking those who thought he was okay.

There's no denying that Lucien is an elusive person, and that was generally okay until now. I could deal with being surprised at six o'clock in the morning with a jolting shake of the limbs from a man hovering behind me as I drank the coffee then spilled by the action of my friend. I could deal with a lack of answers as to what the hell it was that he was doing, because it all added to the spontaneity and the wonder of his enchanting performance. I could deal with not understanding what was whirring in that amazing head of his, as no one ever could anyway, and that was an accepted fact. What I can't deal with, however, is Lucien's suppressed emotions that have finally tumbled free after years of sinking them in more and more trauma, corpulent from affliction and near the point of bursting, and it is my faith that Edie can help me cleanse him of those demons before it's too late, before I lose my only friend, before the shambles in which Lucien has been held turn to shambles themselves.