I haven't visited a carnival since I was ten years old, out with my parents for a special occasion after my father read in the newspaper that the most spectacular circus he saw when in Italy was sojourning in the town, and he had recently received a raise from his boss, a man who usually pushed him towards every breaking point but withdrew him right before the wire of his stability cracked and he tumbled to the dirt. That carnival was an amazing experience while it lasted, despite the masses of people filing in and out of my vision and swarming all around my heavily guarded periphery, because back then I wasn't nearly as anxious as I am now, so carnivals were the highlight of my life when I hadn't yet delved into my passion for metaphysical writing and existential despair, and they were the source of my daydreaming fun.

My mother had won me a stuffed bear that year, as blue as Lucien's ocean eyes with prospect as grand as his, and I've cherished it ever since. However, that treasury only exists in my mind, as an unfortunate event two months after the carnival excursion bulldozed my teddy bear to the point of no return, and yes, I was devastated, but why have corporeal items when you can reserve them in your mind without the clutter? That's kind of what writing is, now that I think about it — storing different types of underworlds in your mind for different types of demons, avoiding the conflict of reality whenever it is possible, fabricating stories out of the magic of white and grey brain matter joining together in pure humanity, everything that could ever be stocked inside of an organ and that organ's outward personality.

But now my organ and my organ's outward personality have turned against me, betrayed the qualities with which I thought I was familiar until those are only the remnants of a well fed childhood, but now I am a writer who writes because they have involuntarily neglected the bliss of joy because of our distorted personalities slandered by adulthood. That is the sole thing we writers are adept at, because we are burrowed in trenches and in all of the broken places so that we may be forgotten. We who are estranged from civil decency will die in civil decency, because the world strives to lure us into our worst fears without blinking, writing us into stories we are unaware of, and in that doom is where we rot against the unforgiving splinters of our coffins, never to be seen again as internalized rage ferments inside of us like wine as ancient as our hatred for institution.

And it is a blight when a writer such as that is forced to venture outside for something as commercial as a carnival (especially after writing a fiery rant about capitalism just days before) when they'd much rather dwell in their manmade underworlds and dingy basements, not be greeted by people I'll never see again, people who will sprout poisonous berries of envy towards others in a matter of seconds once they glimpse an item as mundane as a prize that they've won from an almost impossible game, and writers despise those people. Those are the people writers write about, the annoying side character who just won't leave, no matter what the protagonist does, but even if there aren't too many people like that, people in general are a curse to a writer.

There are lots of citizens at carnivals, which is a blessing for Lucien, who enjoys observing every aspect of life somatized into bodies tinged by sunspots and wrinkles and skin tones and everything that the world has deposited upon them, but it's a curse for me, who despises human interaction and would have been content with living in Edie and Jack's basement until I die from a lack of nutrition and Vitamin D, and though my social skills have improved since I moved in with Lucien, they're still not at the approximate baseline of the average human, but Lucien will not settle unless he's repented for a crime that he doesn't need to repent, and I can't just refuse a night on the exclusively theatrical town with my best friend to protect my limited comfort zone, shriveled to the size of a pea, and he's joyous in this moment, as he waits for the administrator clad in an outrageous clown costume to permit him to enter the carnival, because it's clear that he is quite enamored by these places, and I don't hope to ruin that for him. Even if this is to repent but Lucien is here mostly to have a good time, I won't judge him for that, because a good time is something he deserves and has deserved for a while. Metaphysicists like him need a break sometimes.

"Aren't you just pleased?" Lucien chirps, huddled beside me with eyes as buoyant as a child who would be visiting this place anyway, and although I can admit that I don't wish to spoil Lucien's jocularity, that's not going to persuade me to follow the same route, as anxiety isn't hindered by the fulfillment of the susceptible masses, but I nod nevertheless, and he is henceforth complacent. He boils with each moment that the administrator hesitates, but it's not a stew pot of anger, rather a stew pot of elation with so much intensity that I doubt I've witnessed it before from a generally calm person like him, though when he's riled up by topics such as Greek and Roman mythology on the tables of the library, it's difficult to smother his artistic bubbling.

Finally, after a few minutes of anticipation, the administrator allows us into the park, and upon this permission, Lucien practically drags me past the egg shell gates as if he's a child who has been wound up by only a few seconds of anticipation, a common effect of a young age, and it requires the zenith of my strength to not fall over onto the foliaceous ground and receive a face full of leaves and dirt and familiar cackling from behind me.

"Calm down, Lucien!" I order, still being towed by the spirit of an oxen, a spirit that I was unaware he possessed in such an abundance, and through the turmoil I begin to wonder how many secrets he reserves in his ostensibly fragile limbs.

Lucien never pivots towards me, opting for an argument about how I'm just being a Debby downer and a pushover to the demons of anxiety, negating, "But there are so many people!"

"Yeah, that's the point."

Taking me by surprise, Lucien whirls around all of the sudden, his ocean eyes grilled by fire upon polluted seas, and he suggests, "How about we ride the Ferris wheel? That sounds like fun, right?"

I hope to inform him that it may be fun to him, but it's definitely not fun to me after terrible experiences with a fear of heights, though he's already rambling about how alluring it is, how the science operates in such a way that it's ignored by common people to instead bask unknowingly in the romantic ambience it creates, and he allots no room for my protests of my anxiety towards it and how that anxiety cannot be resolved by how fun it sounds to other people, but I know that even if I could remind him of that, he wouldn't listen anyway.

So I only glance up to the beast of a machine, the metal supporting the structure that will support my death a threat looming far over me. It retains too much power for it to assure me that it's fine. It could fucking tip me from one of its wobbling chairs, and though it's reinforced by the same science that Lucien was chattering endlessly about, I don't trust it to be fully operational. There are always flukes. People will tell others that there's no use in being apprehensive and that nothing will happen to them, but that's what the injured riders thought right before they were wounded by a machine that claimed to be loyal to their joyriding desires.

The same goes for people. You can't trust them, chiefly right off the bat, because humans are always in it for their own personal gain and don't really give a shit about others when you get to the core of their hearts, and they'd willingly tip someone out of their wobbling seats if it meant the load would be off of their back, and I suppose I'm not so far from that. I've spent so long trying to separate myself from other humans, but the truth is that we all have brains, and those brains all work essentially in the same way in the basics. Yes, there are variations which we unjustly shame, but a brain is a brain at its roots in one's skull. And Lucien is using his to torment mine, so I must tell him off.

"I'm scared of Ferris wheels," I admit in the plainest of manners, not sharing why I'm scared of them, but I presume that's somewhat self-explanatory when you glance at the beast of a machine.

Lucien swings my arms along with him, only a bit frustrated by my opposition, mostly just exuberant for a ride on the Ferris wheel. "Life is about fucking the consequences, Allen."

I release his hands, peevishness cajoling my voice towards its shadowy depths. "What if I don't want to fuck the consequences?"

The emotion is wiped from his face, only dropping subtle dashes of disappointment in me. "Then you're like a leaf riding a wave. You don't go any place different, but you think you are, because the wave is moving. However, all you do is float along the transverse illusion to absolutely nowhere."

Lucien doesn't ever allow me to argue with his philosophical spiels, so it is my only choice to accept, simultaneously killing myself. But we're all dead anyway, right? That's what Lucien would say, though I'm not so trusting of Lucien right now. Maybe he'll be tipped out of the chair. 

~~~~~

A/N: wow these morbid thoughts about your bae falling from a ferris wheel very nice allen

physicalism: everything has a physical property

~Dakotip-me-out-of-this-ferris-wheel