I was foolishly praying, as I promenaded through the winding aisles of the local supermarket on the hunt for sustenance, that Lucien's attitude would have improved by the time I ventured back home, but as I said, it was a foolish prayer, and the moment I stepped into the house I could detect that nothing had shifted at all. He was still the same morose pile of laziness and spite, sipping the tiniest amount of tea just so that he could press it in between his berry lips as if he were killing it.

I assume that's all he did, as Lucien didn't appear to wreck anything while I was out. In fact, it looks as though he didn't move anything at all, merely touched it at the most like a middle-aged white woman gliding her fingers along the walls of an abandoned house before she is captured by the umbrageous heart within. My roommate may be too wearied to do anything except sip that godforsaken tea that's driving a wrench into our communication because it's "not like he can do anything while he's drinking, sorry".

It's obvious that he didn't want to talk to me, instead muttering something about how he needed to cleanse himself, and shuffling off to the bathroom to spend who knows how long in the shower while I pondered where the hell his conviviality went, as this is not the Lucien Carr by whom I was enchanted when I first met him at the Paterson Public Library.

This could be because Lucien is only degenerating steadily, tumbling down the stairs yet rolling too quickly to detect where each ledge is and when he falls from it, or it could be because something happened while I was out at the store trying to feed the person who is losing his ability to do so himself, and while both are catastrophic occurrences to Lucien's health, it's no secret that the latter could be far more harmful than the former, especially because that occurrence could continue to manifest later down the road of gravely daggers and slick blades of grass creeping onto the path, and perhaps the worst part about this is that Lucien will never tell me what that occurrence was unless he pens it into a suicide note that he would never leave because it's tacky and cliche and unlike him to give the world something when he owes it nothing, and all of this is falling apart right in front of me, with no solution in sight.

Lucien says I shouldn't protest what is irreversible, but Lucien also says that nothing he does in life matters, when in reality it does matter if he can affect future generations sprawled across the map of time until our fiery life source becomes our death source. He can do so much, yet he chooses to ignore it to instead waste away in a dingy old apartment he can barely afford with the meager job he was able to attain after skipping college to unchain himself. When I try to express how much Lucien has changed my perspective on life, he only retaliates with the concept that I am only as enlightened as I am impressionable, and that his words are only scaffolding for the building of my mind, a hollow frame to support my own potential, and I know he's just trying to be humble, despite shouting every thought he has about homosexuality in Greek and Roman mythology to the library patrons on the table in his fucking workplace, but he should really give himself more credit, tell himself that his life isn't worthless, that it's one of the rare few that imperatively craves to be lived, even if he struggles to live it.

But no, that's not what he's going to do. All that he is going to do is waste an hour or so in the shower, allowing mitigated tears to plop against his back as his head hangs weighted by his feet and his soul vaporizes into steam insinuating the mirror upon which he will etch his last farewell. And it's not like I can burst through the bathroom door and talk to my roommate, as I'll be labeled a creep for lack of better, more rational words, and it's anyway harsh to interrupt him while he's enjoying one of his limited moments of peace, so I only wait for him to emerge, however far in the future that will be.

While nothing has been disturbed in the apartment from an inside man, I notice that there is a new voicemail left from someone outside of the house. Lucien Carr may be an extraordinary man, but he isn't popular (sometimes he's feared for being so wild and in people's faces), and to the extent of my knowledge, I was unaware that he had any friends besides me, and maybe Edie and Jack if he's feeling unjustly audacious. Lucien is the type of person to brag about his friends, not lure them into secrecy from his best friend, as if I could be jealous when I hold the top spot, so who the hell could this voicemail be from?

I know it's not my right to intrude, and I know hover parents are the parents keenest to emotional abuse, but I can't grant Lucien a dip into the thick waters of danger just because it's polite to mind my own fucking business. My business concerns my retrograde of a roommate and how long he has to live before he imposes permanent darkness upon himself, so without pausing to debate this any further, I slam my finger down on the voicemail button and anticipate a ster chat with Lucien about who the hell this person is.

There's hesitant breathing on the other end, breathing from a man about whom I know nothing and of whom I'm slightly scared. He's composing himself before he begins spewing out torture, which, from my rusty skills of deduction, means that this message is loaded with tumultuous intentions, intentions that will surely stomp panic into my already battered heart.

The stranger macerates his worries with a final breath, richer than the others before it, and proceeds with the message. "Lu," is all he says at first, and it seems as though it was quite the ordeal just to shove that out of his deceitful lips.

I've never heard of this man before, yet he's so intimate with my best friend that he has a fucking nickname for him. Yeah, Lucien calls me Ginsy on some occasions, and it's no doubt my decision if I wanted to reciprocate that format, but the circumstances of that two letter sigh crackling through the receiver like fingers ravished by acrimony squashing a non-refundable plane ticket to hell are too foreboding for me to ignore. How close were these two, and for how long? Why is the stranger so stressed about his approaching message?

"I'm sorry about what happened earlier this morning."

What did happen earlier this morning? It must've transpired while I was out shopping for the means necessary to keep Lucien's fading heart at the pace of normalcy, and that's why I have no idea why this guy is calling. Is this why Lucien was remarkably peevish when I returned back home after my trip to the supermarket? Is this the event I predicted to be the reason why Lucien barely spoke to me before rushing off for a shower?

I don't want him to keep secrets from me, but that's all he's been doing, just avoiding and avoiding and avoiding, bumping into things and being repelled by them next, heaping his worries onto each other to the point where they could suffocate him yet devoting every ounce of his energy to distancing himself from them all as if they're worth his time.

I had always assumed that Lucien could take care of himself — after all, that's what he had been doing before he met me, the overprotective mother of his life — but I'm now discovering that this is too much, even for him. Lucien is undoubtedly a bold man, brave and resilient and angering towards his opponents, but the catch is that he never actually considered his antagonists to be his, only acknowledged that he was a blight to them. Perhaps this man on the telephone line is the real antagonist here, the train to plow down my friend as if he never existed, the ruiner of lives other than just Lucien's, the antichrist for all I know, and he won't stop fucking talking, and it's almost like I don't need an explanation when it's flowing from his mouth, though I continue to listen, because I'm desperate for salvation in a man who intractably rejects it.

"I'll admit that it was wrong to show up at your apartment offering no reason for doing so, but you need to understand that I am not the bad guy here."

This guy just randomly appeared at the apartment uninvited and tried to convince Lucien that what he was doing wasn't immoral? Just from the action of violating Lucien's personal space in the form of a building leads me to believe that, whatever this guy did, it isn't deserving of my companion's praise, and he needs to get the hell out of his life.

I contemplate calling this unlawful stranger back and scold him for impinging on Lucien's safe haven, not giving a single shit if he has no idea who I am, just as I have no idea who he is, but my plan is thwarted when I spot Lucien traipsing through the hallway and into the kitchen, where I stand as I uncover secrets that I should not have uncovered, where I feel like a deer in the headlights, where I will be reprimanded for my nosiness.

Lucien is calm now, working a towel through his dampened locks of gold, but when he detects the faint sound of his friend's voice on the answering machine, his eyes begin to cradle the rawest form of anxiety that I have ever seen in my life.

My roommate stalks over to me, as cautious as a protagonist in the presence of an unstable criminal as they reach to confiscate the gun, and he is no longer in the calm state I had hoped he would be in forever. "What are you doing, Allen?"

I can't allow him to bypass me, to receive mollified treatment when such treatment is unfitting for the dire setting, so I cut right to the crucial bits of the matter. "Who is that man on the voicemail?"

Lucien shrugs it off, more panicked than casual. "That's not important."

"So you're practically dying in your own self-pity, and you want to tell me that this man whose intentions sound pretty fucking vindictive isn't important to the case?"

"It's not your job to fucking babysit me, Allen," Lucien contradicts, applying a scanty amount of torsion to his fingers to occupy himself in a time of nervousness. "I'm older than you anyway."

"With that childish age card you pulled there, it might actually be my job. You're the one who says power is based on how wide one has stretched their world, not on arbitrary statistics you couldn't have controlled even at their genesis, but you've seemingly thrown that down the drain, so why is it that you've all of the sudden deserted every moral you used to cherish to instead dine on your own liver?" I stare at my companion, a travesty of holes and shame, but he is incapable of defending himself; he's had enough.

"You want to know who that man is?" is Lucien's new approach to the situation, his expression like a mother frustratingly relenting to their stubborn child. "His name is David Kammerer, and when we were both age sixteen, he was the reason I wanted to fucking die."

I almost retort that he still wants to die in the present, but it dawns upon me that David is probably the reason for that. He was doing fine before David must've shown up in his life and warped everything towards his faulty perception of what love is. This man I've never met is the cause of Lucien's demise. He is the reason why Lucien can't even look at me. He is the reason why I can't even look at Lucien. He is the reason why our joy has splintered into our murder weapons, why nothing is safe for us anymore.

I thought I was special to my roommate, but it seems I've been overpowered. I may be Lucien's life, but I am not his death. David is. One can be more powerful than the other, and in this case it is abandoning me, so I am rendered irrelevant to the matter. I can continue to be what Lucien lives for, but that doesn't mean shit when he craves oblivion more than he craves existence. There will always be pros and cons to living and dying, and I'm just the singular pro on Lucien's list when death has so many more. It's a fool's move to trick myself into believing that I could stop him from drowning in the frost an old flame has brought about, but I am quite the fool, so I'm trying and failing and picking myself back up because that's what every self-help manual will tell you to do, and it's just not working, but I'm supposed to trust psychology, right? That's what all of this is, just psychology and our brains and why our brains have decided to torture us into accepting the hell that is gloomy metaphysics when the brain is supposed to be magnificent, and since I admire metaphors so much, it's perhaps poetic to say that beneath the shiny exterior of our extraordinary brains, the force of David Kammerer lies within, watching and waiting, prompting his venom like it's the dopamine we have long thirsted for.

But with an excess of dopamine, one becomes immune, and they find themselves hungering for more and more of it to try and rewire their broken system in which nothing makes sense, in which they are borderline insane in the middle of a safe spot called a prelude to time in an institution, in which living is like a psychedelic infarction to what they thought they knew, but soon enough they become aware of their trials and their mistakes and their malfunctioning body that used to move as if it were kin to the wind, and they become aware that they are trapped.

Lucien once hungered for more and more of David Kammerer until he, too, became aware of what was happening to him and somehow broke away from a man who claimed to be a part of him, which is a doctrine he believed for an extremely prolonged duration, a doctrine force fed through a tube because his teeth could no longer operate by themselves, a doctrine serving as a gag to his real opinions that may or may not have been dulled by the extension of his silence, but he was brave enough to slip through his bonds, a twenty-first century escapist renowned only to himself as a means to console his trembling body when he is scared and all alone in trenches furnished with quiet.

And maybe his time of being alone should've been treasured more than it was, because now that David Kammerer has reappeared in his life, Lucien has since been able to comprehend that if David's ever present shadow is what it feels like to have a friend, he wants out of the deal, but after indelible belt scars and traumatization, he can't escape again. He can never escape at all.

This account becomes shockingly evident as Lucien unsheathes himself from a t-shirt as blank as his paralytic mind, scars bursting to life on top of his otherwise silky skin that, once upon a time, was capable of being callused beyond recognition and has since healed only a bit, his own body terrified of its battle wounds and pressing them back into the limited submission it can barely achieve.

Lucien, a boy beaten by life and its inhabitants, has grown strong both in character and in figure. He does not shake as his back is exposed candidly to me, tender muscles rippling under my touch, does not whimper or yelp from sword-wielding nostalgia for someone who doesn't deserve it, does not tell me to release him, not because he is scared to do so, but because he is fortified enough to endure this contact.

"Thank you for opening up to me," I acknowledge, the most appropriate thing I can say in this situation, a typical stock phrase printed in coming out manuals for its lack of problematic points, and on one hand, it's the best I can do and something that can't go wrong, but on the other hand, I kind of hate myself for proposing something that didn't originate in my soul, a valley talented with so much more than seven meaningless words.

However, Lucien doesn't seem to mind them. "I figured I should elucidate at least one thing to you."

"We can get through this," I vow, the most genuine of promises. "Together." This is when chocolate yearns for crystal, when mud cascades into the ocean but the ocean loves it, when our stare can only be upstaged by the mingling of our lips to signify that not all is lost.

The kiss is unlike our other one, with the romanticism of a Ferris wheel displaced by the romanticism of two souls wracked by timeless harmony, quenched and substantial on the scale of, and it's not that it's better than that carnival excursion, rather plastic. Bathed in trauma and withheld secrets, it's no lie that this not the same, that it doesn't maintain the allure of its predecessor, but it's all we've got, and soon even that might be lost.

~~~~~

A/N: gotdamn elucidation

determinism: all events occur ineluctably

~Dakotoe-job