I'm still caught in the haze that is Lucien's apartment, with all of its dirtiness and its sordidness and its resemblance to the fiery depths of hell where our minds have been all along, and everything feels distorted, like a wobbly lens has been slid over the main lens to warp my surroundings towards delirium and a delusion that I am either dying or losing my wits with the speed of a cargo train shipping them away, because none of this makes sense, both this apartment and my reasoning for deciding to live in it with another person who isn't one of my mental demons.

Why would I do that? I'm such a solitary person, locked up in a basement by choice, not because I'm being forced into it even by something as minor as subliminal messaging or the desire for captivity by effect of Stockholm syndrome, but now I'm out in the real word. I met someone whom I would willingly call my friend, and now I'm living in the apartment that is too blurry for its own good, and I have no idea what the hell is happening to me right now.

My blood cells are drops of a poison that no one can place. My lungs are the tattered remnants of a house after a storm. My heart is the dilapidated leftovers of a uniform after war. It is required to be there, but it is no longer functional, and no one can see that underneath that uniform there is a gaping bullet wound that's selling all my secrets to the grave. My life is in ruins, in rags, in the hell that I have created to punish myself, and I am finally drowning in it, in my long awaited success.

Yet this isn't where I'm supposed to be. This is all off, nothing like the underworld that I had imagined since I learned to imagine death and all things tragic that really aren't tragic to those who want it yet never receive it because the world has a knack for teasing us with our greatest faiths. This is not that, nowhere near it. I'm confused in this location, but I'm not confused enough to ignore the fact that this apartment is not where I should be.

This path I've chosen irrationally to follow will lead me straight to a cesspool who might be better than this place in the way that it's much clearer, because in this place there are plates all across the carpeted floor with probably molding hardwood underneath, and in this place there is the haunting threat of paper cuts from the scarlet inked manuscripts piled on the various chairs of the apartment, and in this place there is a man whom I met only a few days ago but is now my roommate, and I'm fucking petrified of what will happen to me and to him, as if the house is a monster seeking us both with the sharp teeth of broken glass on guard at the windowsill, with the sandpaper tongue of the carpet in the entrance hall, with the swaying chandelier arming itself for destruction upon our unsuspecting heads marked by crumbling halos, and I don't trust this place.

How can I trust anything when I can't even trust my mind, the core part of who I am, the one who controls my bodily operations, the one who controls what I think, how I act, what I decide, though this recent decision is faulty? How can I not be clutching the walls to break free of the approaching locus of the couch only to step away from that wall for fear that it will consume me, too? How can I settle down when Lucien is shaking me and telling me that there's nothing, because I see it all, and that certainly isn't a nothing or even a quiet existence at all?

There's a jolting in my bones, like a thousand doctors huddled in a hospital room with the emergency of a failing heart, with their paddles poised to shock me back into living a life I don't want to live anymore, living a life that ushered me towards this route of fogginess and confusion. There are hands on me, suffocating and sharp, clenching and retracting like atria and ventricles pulsing in unison to sustain something, that something being my perpetual terror, attempting to pull me towards something, and their efforts shoot light into my blearing eyes until it's all like walking on the sun, my feet crisping and flying away into more and more lava, my corneas burning and burning and burning towards ebony, towards surrender, towards complete and utter decay, towards everything that I've hidden from, everything that I hate, everything that I'll admit I'm scared of, everything that injects tears into my cheeks and injects positions of a ball into my legs and injects the singular notion that I am not where I am supposed to be, as I've said time and time again.

And all of the sudden it just halts, like a meteor being pinched by the dictator of the universe as if it were a fly, and the colors of reality tiptoe from the shadows of the underworld to greet me again, a child guilty of a crime they did not commit who is finally secure enough to peek out from the corner, and then there's Lucien, the beautiful boy with ocean eyes and golden threads woven into his scalp with the precision of a goddess, who is ostensibly scalded by red under his foliaceous lashes that now cease to transmit such powerful energy like they almost always do, and the confusion returns for a round two, unsatisfied with their knock out in the prior period.

"Allen!" Lucien yelps as he rattles me, a dog shrouded by both the fear of the transpiring events and the fear that it was their fault, and I want to explain to him that I don't know what was just happening and if it was his fault or not, but he's so concerned about me that I doubt he was associated with the horrors I have recently witnessed. The ocean of his eyes tips over his bottom lid -- the dam is ruptured, in more ways than one.

"Y-yeah...I just...I'm just nervous about being here. I'm not sure if this is the right place for me. This is all spinning by me so quickly. I, um...I don't have time to comprehend it all."

That's the best excuse I can formulate in such little time, but I assume that it's what actually sparked the birth of this storm, so I stick with it as my alibi, because that actually seems logical, and I need logical things in my life after experiencing that mania.

"You'll acclimate to it, Allen," Lucien reassures me with a jittering pat on the back, still rocked by my temporary absence from reality. "But what the hell was that?"

I shove a smile out of the slot of my mouth, forcing solace onto someone who needs it. "A delusion of a writer." It's a shitty thing to say to someone who is genuinely worried about me, but I know he connects to anything referencing writers, even if it doesn't make a scrap of sense.

Lucien is silent, unsure of how to proceed when the salient piece of his personality is being bold and devoid of regret, so he elects to alter the subject. "Do you...do you want some dinner? You're probably starving after that whole ordeal."

If I were him, I'd also divert the subject, because Lucien wouldn't understand what's whipping through my head. Writers, who are tasked with understanding the horrors of the human mind, don't know as much as the public thinks they do. They know their own struggles and the struggles of their friends, but they do not know all struggles. That is why there is no cure to them, why illness never becomes stale, as it is always mutating, always plaguing, always surprising those who don't deserve it, and Lucien is not close enough of a friend to understand, either, so I only comply with his offer of dinner.

I don't actually need any dinner, especially since we just ate lunch, but I think the cozy activity of cooking will help him calm down if not me. "Yes, please, if you could." I follow Lucien to the kitchen, where he branches off towards the cabinets and I branch off towards a chair at the dining table to collect myself, and I require a steady flow of outward breath before I can utter two mundane words: "Thank you."

Lucien strangles his activity of procuring utensils from the cabinet into inertion, darkened by acute contemplation. "Yeah, no problem." His voice is as frail as I've ever heard it, but why? Why does he give a single shit about a screw up like me? He's probably a fantastic writer! He's destined for acclaim with those magnificent words of his. He can stir people's minds so that they finally think for once. Why is he wasting his time on me? He shouldn't care, but he does, and I'm beginning to hate him for it, as I don't deserve anything he's given me, whether that's a life or a house or an ability to ponder the complexities of existence through the metaphysics he spews out to seem simple when no one else can see it as he can with the blindfolds snapped over their eyes for protection against what is truly here and what is truly dangerous and what is truly their cause of death.

But I yearn to see what Lucien speaks of each and every day I greet him under the umbrella of secrets that we know but the rest of the world doesn't, secrets of poetry, of loss, of amphigories, secrets of drowning under our mothers' cradle in betrayal, secrets of details we click onto our papers to remain relevant, secrets as banal as Lucien cooking poorly in the kitchen just to provide me with a refuel after my delusional excursion, because though he is not a master chef (nowhere near it, in fact, from what I can see from my spot at the table), he cares enough to try.

"How chivalrous of you," I jest while sifting the stray napkins on the table between my fingers on the pursuit of something to stimulate my restless thoughts.

Never pivoting towards me to address my thanks, Lucien rapidly deadpans, "Chivalry is dead, and so am I."

I skew my face in bewilderment. "Well okay then."

Too spontaneous to cleave to a single subject for longer than two minutes, Lucien tries his luck with small talk. "Have you gotten any responses on your rhyme and meter article?"

Ah, yes, the rhyme and meter article, the article that brought us together when we first met in the library a few days ago, the article that I thought I would hate researching because every book will praise rhyme and meter for doing nothing besides enforcing mandatory learning principles upon young poets of this generation and older poets who couldn't escape it, but now I'm grateful that an audacious reader suggested it to me, because now I've met the most brilliant person I've ever seen in my entire life, and he has no idea that this article ignited this relationship.

"Yeah, my blog is pretty popular, so I receive lots of comments daily."

The spoon Lucien is utilizing to stir the uncooked rings of pasta collides with the bowl, luring a sharp sound from the metal. Did he not think I could operate a successful blog? Yeah, I know I'm awkward, but awkward people can be absolute legends on the Internet, and Lucien seems to think I'm intelligent -- though intelligence is defined by the individual, not some old twat wasting away in a college as ancient as him, who thinks that rhyme and meter are still fundamental to merited literary works -- but Lucien has faith in me, a faith that I may squander with my foolishness but a faith that guides me towards motivation, although he's astonished that I could accomplish the title of running a famous blog.

Lucien scours his mind for a speedy recovery, which he discovers quicker than the lightning of his ecstatic eyes. "Well if you've researched rhyme and meter so thoroughly, then what, do you suppose, is the meter for degeneration? Is it hasty so that it induces a scare, or is it gradual so that the victim can witness as they waste away into nothing?"

I consider this for a moment, just what Lucien wants for his pretentious nature somatized in these weighted questions, but I cannot shape an answer, much like most of the people he approaches with loaded philosophy, so I play him as he played me to brush off my cluelessness. "I think you'll have to figure that out yourself, Lucien."

Lucien spins away from the stove, hands choking the ledge of the counter, dangerously close to the heat, and he drapes himself elegantly in the most devilish smirk he owns. "You're on, Allen Ginsberg."

And perhaps I should recognize the wine paired with studying the meter of deterioration, but I'm too caught up in his beauty to notice.  

~~~~~

A/N: Lucien can be so sweet I'm just

solipsism: the belief that the self is everything and nothing else exists beyond that

~Duckota