The Metaphysicist (Kill Your Darlings) | Featured

you know he dead

Lucien has no idea where he's going, but that doesn't matter to him when he's got a death wish on his mind. Well, not exactly a death wish in a corporeal form, rather a death wish that obliterates all of his morals to instead live freely and choose to utilize that freedom in a destructive manner, which isn't advised by many, but it's what he needs at the moment when he turned away every person who just wanted to help him, including his own best friend who was invested in him more than anyone, and it's not like he can go back to plead for mercy, because everyone knows that men are fragile when it comes to their masculinity, and nothing hurts a man more than reneging on his brutal words from the heat of a situation, so they suffer alone, and Lucien supposes that this is where they collect their strength from in the way of veneers and deception, as they are forced to walk through hell with no one to guide them, and they toughen up their skin and sturdy their bones and square their shoulders and meander through the screeching fires of the underworld.

And that's what Lucien is doing at this time, except the underworld here is the opposite of the general imagery. The general underworld is as hot as a desert and even hotter so, like the temperature has baked peppers into one's skin and branded them with searing metal to mark them as taken, while this underworld in which Lucien strolls warily is as cold as his heart for pushing away people who love him, like rain cascading from the sky and freezing half way down the slope because they are imprisoned in torturous bonds just as he is.

Lucien Carr recognizes that he is being a coward, being the type of people that he absolutely despises for narrowing the expanse that is life to instead wallow in fear and selfishness, but Lucien Carr recognizes that he might as well despise himself for doing shit like this, shit like sneaking out of the dingy old apartment to dwell in a dingy old bar with citizens of Paterson, New Jersey that thankfully don't know him but might know his body after the night has slipped its ashen film over the sky, which he hasn't shamed before as a coping mechanism but could shame due to the circumstances of his use of it, though it's not like he's going to revise his actions to soothe the person that wouldn't be soothed if he were to desert his motives, so he sticks himself to his plan of questionable intentions.

For some undiscovered reason, Lucien is extremely anxious to do something as mundane as step through the doors and into the bar. The outcome of the night should be the more worrying event, but the troubled wayfarer is rather stricken by the weight of entering the path that will lead him to that event, somewhat of a paradox in a mind that praises them but not in this moment, and it's like a tug of war now that he's been stationed in front of the gates of hell for a few seconds longer than this outgoing writer would usually be stationed here. It's frustrating to say the least, because it seems as though the qualities Lucien once boasted of are nothing but bitches to deterioration, and it's reached the point where he can't even fucking open a door, not a result of his physical strength, however, rather his mental strength, when his mind is supposed to be the thing he trusts the most, when his mind is fleeing.

On the contrary, Lucien Carr, a man of scholarly excellence in an institution amorphous and like no other, will not condone his insolence, and no matter how difficult it is, he forces himself to be as reckless as he is when he doesn't give a shit, now ineluctably woven into a moment when he does, and as if it were a thousand pounds, the door to the bar uneasily slides open.

Lucien, at a loss for better metaphors due to the crumbling of a brain who would regularly gush them, believes that he is rising from the cackling dirt of his grave that he plowed over with the truck of his mind. Lucien Carr is much more than pushing overtop his body with a wheelbarrow in which his peers reside, much more than helplessness.

He wants to fix himself, repair a broken child not with his friends but with a deity who wishes to fix him, with a deity that has led similar people into similar prospects, and he lets the anger fill him. He lets the anger twist his soul into a rag to wipe its eyes with. He lets the anger pull him from the ashes of his smoldering ambitions of childhood and grasp the last ember trembling with the capacity for rebirth. He lets the anger guide him blindly fumbling into a heavenly deliverance that he have never glimpsed before, never in his writing or in his imagination that was too extraordinary to document, nowhere in a soul as shattered as his. He lets the anger marry him and consummate the union with the splitting of an axe on his newfound steel body, bathed in lava and fortified by his faithful rudiarius of antipathy. He lets the anger convince him of its benefits, of its potency even in the backwash of poison, of potential he could not derive from himself. He lets the anger be the only friend he will never need, the only friend he will ever want. He lets the anger be more than the scar tissue in the matter his very own brain, more than pretending that he is okay when he is far from it. He lets the anger thrive in him, plant its tendrils of power into the blankness of schizotypality until all he knows is its shivering embrace. He lets the anger alchemize his fears into glass at which he can marvel under a silky blanket of stars, now polluted by the evolution of an anthropoid spleen he can never reverse and whose tales he pens into paper with ink dripping from a quill like blood drips from his wearied eyes. He lets the anger persuade him into cognitive reproduction to fuel an indomitable ego, an ego that may be his own, an ego that may be shared between him and his friend sprung fresh from the widely renowned throne of hell. He lets the anger be his sole cadence humming lowly under treacherous nights in the heart of his heart, a compendium of artificialized knowledge slammed into paper that will never compare to this deity. He lets the anger drape him in libations to their collective success and drizzle its elegant possessions with wine sour enough for inebriation. He lets the anger blindfold him from the pleas of people who never cared before, pleas for mercy, pleas for release, pleas for empty words. He lets the anger kick scotch over his grave both to wish it good riddance and to spoil the dirt in which he spoiled before they met. He lets the anger fix him, passing an invitation card over to a burdened man at the bar with a growing thirst for recklessness his partner instead of the person he should be with right now, reassuring that person that everything is okay, even when it's not, because that's what love is.

But it's a fucking fools' move to assume that Lucien Carr knows anything about love, when he's climbing into a coffin of eroticism with someone who never begged for their ashes to be with his, when another man would've been fulfilled by the prospect, when that man has no idea where his friend has gone and would be horrified to know that Lucien is at a bar filled with people that don't give a shit about him besides his body, as frail as it is, but Lucien doesn't seem to give a shit about anything, either, so it is with the peeling of his emotion (sparing anger, of course) that he approaches just the apathy that he needs for the night.

Who has the time to care about explaining emotion when there's someone standing at the back of the room who seems to understand the complexity of Lucien Carr's bereavement? Yes, the young writer is as dangerous as any other writer is (more so, in fact), and yes, it's shameful to be out on the town when there are people elsewhere who could give him lifelong gifts, but can one really scorn his choices in partners when it's the closest thing Lucien has to acceptance? Lucien isn't sure what the stranger knows with that watchful stare of his, but perhaps it's something that he lacks, something that he hopes to regain through the channel of another person, no matter how sordid that may seem to the public.

But as he preaches, being a writer is about presenting the truth to people who are scared of it in order to broaden their perception of life. Being a writer is not about sheltering the dirty parts of mental exploration, because chances are someone will derive meaning from them, meaning that could potentially shift their perspective on life forever, and that's Lucien's dream after abandoning the rest of them. This may be destructive at the first glance, but no one can truly understand anything at such a scanty analysis, now can they?

Maybe Lucien's just scouring his brain for excuses, and maybe he just doesn't care about them anyway.

~~~~~

A/N: I call myself lazy so often and some of you like to debate it but like.....I literally included lines from my poems in this to hit a word count after not writing for three weeks like???

ascenticism: refraining from indulging in pleasures to instead pursue "virtuous" lifestyles

~Dakotable-flipper